
Class. 
Book 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



/ 




J"TJHK.?UD> W*C0J&LLS 18&20^5TD1^PLJ{!C 



R 



HEX) SPEI1TG, 

Saratoga Springs, N. Y. 

ED S Tilt NO water is the leading remedial mineral water of the country. It is celebrated for the cure 
of Eruptions of the Skin, Salt Rheum, Scrofula, Erysipelas, Inflamed Eyes, Granulated Eyelids, Dyspepsia, 
Catarri), Rheumatism, Kidney Disorders, and all diseases arising from impurities of the blood. 




RED SPRING I5^TIIS. 

The RED SPRING BATHS, owing to the alkaline properties of Red Spring water, are wonderfully efficacious in 
cure of Rheumatism ami other di -eases ari.-iug from an excess of acid in the system. 
Red Spring water, frush writer, Ditman's Sea-Salt, plunge and shower BATHS given at any temperature, at all 
irs of the dav and evening. Our bath-rooms, forty in number, are elegantly lined up and are kept scrupulously clean. 
Take the Red Spring Melt Line carriages for the Red Spring and Baths. 
Red S_pring water, sold only in bottles, is shipped everywhere. tW Send for circulars. 

KEI> SPRIXG CO., Saratoga Spring*, *.V. 



SARATOGA CHIPS 



AND 



Carlsbad Wafers. 



THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS AND HEALTH AT 

THE TWO GREAT MINERAL WATER RESORTS 

OF AMERICA AND EUROPE. 









i;y 



NATHAN 'SHEPPARD. 



AUTHOR OF "BEFORE AN AlTIKNl K ; " " SHUT UP IN PARIS;" EDITOR OF 

" GEORGE KLIOT'S ESSAYS;" " CHARACTER HEADINGS FROM GEORGE 

ELIOT ;" "THE DICKKNS READER," AND "DARWINISM 

STATED UV DARWIN HIMSELF." 



ILLUSTRATED. 




FUNK & WAGNALLS, Publishers. 



NEW YORK : 
l8 & 20 ASTOR PLACE. 



I 887 



LONDON : 
44 FLEET STREET. 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1887, 

By FUNK & WAGNALLS, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D. C. 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



PAGE 

Slide and House of Saratoga Toboggan Club. . ..Frontispiece 

General Boulanger 12 

( )\ kkweight 21 

" A Sight to See and a Scene to Kkmembeh" 28 

The Sprudel— " How can You Doubt," etc Hi 

The Goddess Hygeia — " She Deiykn Away," etc 

The Poet Schiller at Carlsbad 

Bathjb op Caracalla 96 

A Show ].i;-1'»\tii 108 

RESIDENCE OF HON. GSOBGS S. BatcHELLKR 110 

"Yaddo," Eesidence of Sfenceb Tease, Bsq 12o 

RESIDENCE OF S. GlFFORD Sliktm, Bsq 128 

Residence of W. B. Gage, Esq 146 

Residence of General W. B. French 162 

Winter Cure for Malaria 171 

A Winter Scene on Broadway, Saratoga SpBiNoe 17~> 

A Crack Shot 179 

Residence of J. P. Gilson, Esq 182 

Residence of Hon. C. S. Lester 198 

11 Dinner's Ready, Sir !" 199 

Residence of Dr. B. M. Kendall 210 

" The Malarious Peruvian Hears," etc 222 

A Mud Bath 233 

Residence of E. T. Brackett, Esq 236 

" Saratoga Has What can be Found," etc 237 

" There is no Tonic for the System," etc 241 

" The only Hope for the Human Family," etc 246 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 



' BEFORE AN AUDIENCE; 

OR, 

THE USE OF THE WILL IN PUBLIC 
SPEAKING. 



TALKS TO THE STUDENTS OE THE UNIVERSITY 

OF ST. ANDREWS AND THE UNIVERSITY 

OF ABERDEEN. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

These Chips and Wafers 9 

From Saratoga to Cablsbad 13 

The Carlsbad Treatment 85 

Stray Wafers 43 

All the Cures 81 

All the Baths 93 

Analytical Difficulties. 100 

The Remedial Effect of Common-Sens] 119 

From Cablsbad to Sabatog v 127 

The Mineral- Water Tbeatment Hebe and Thebe. 145 

The Saratoga Tbeatment 161 

Flying Chits 181 

The Saratoga Gayety Cube 197 

Chips and Wafers 209 

The Saratoga Winter Cure 235 



SARATOGA CHIPS. 



THESE CHIPS AM) WAFERS. 

A neighbob who has a reputation worth preserv- 
ing for manufacturing Saratoga chips kindly con- 
tributes this recipe to this volume : 

Pure and slice thin eight white potatoes with a 
vegetable sheer. Let them soak about an hour in 
a pan of iced water, the colder the better. Drain 
and dry them on a cloth. Fry a small handful at 
a time in about three pints of hot lard in a deep 
kettle, stirring them constantly with a long-handled 
skimmer until they are crisp ; then take them out, 
and sprinkle them with salt. In winter and spring, 
when the potatoes are old, it will be necessary to 
soak them in water for half a day. 

The Chips that follow do not belong to the vege- 
table kingdom, and therefore could not be very 
well sliced by a " vegetable slicer," but they should 
have been simmered andskimmered until they were 
dry and crisp, and liberally sprinkled with chloride 
of sodium. That will give them a flavor which is 
designed to create an appetite for them, which can- 



10 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

not be satisfied by them. The more you have of 
them, the more you will want of them. 

If the facts or truths out of which they are made 
should be very old or trite, or if they are diminutive 
potatoes and a limited number in a hill, all the more 
should they be soaked in mineral water. They 
may be overdone, or underdone, and they need not 
hang together. Their consistency may be question- 
able, and they may be as innocent of continuity as 
an after-dinner speech. They will be found all the 
more palatable and salable on that account. The 
lightest thoughts are often cooked with hot ink in 
a deep kettle. 

The Carlsbad Wafer is another ingenious attain- 
ment in the literary cuisine. The original is a cake 
about the size of the top of a silk hat, and about as 
thin as the hair under the hat. It is made chiefly 
of flour, sugar, the bark of vanilla and of cinna- 
mon. My Carlsbad medical doctor says, " That is 
all I know about it." If he is as good at a recipe 
as he is at a diagnosis, he can be depended upon for 
wafers as safely as for medical advice. 

Carlsbad wafers should not be too flowery or too 
sugary, and too much cinnamon may make them 
too spicy. While they should be thin, they should 
not be too thin, and while they should be sweet, 
they should not be so sweet as to be flat. They 
come twelve in a box, and more than that in the 
book, and they can be devoured all at once or one 
at a time. They are alike in size and flavor in the 



THESE CHIPS AXD WAFERS. 



11 



box, but differ in dimensions and constituents in 
the book, and may have no more to do with one 
another than the people who read them. 

They should be suggestive, and not exhaustive of 
either the subject or the reader. 

Whether Chips or Wafers, whether these chats 
and notes concern the renowned mineral- water re- 
sort of Europe or the equally famous national spa 
of America, they should be relishable and useful 
to the multitudes who gather there in pursuit of 
health, rest, or fun, vitalized air or mineralized 
water. 

If the author shall succeed in this purpose, no 
cook in the world will be happier than he, not only 
because he will benefit his readers, but because he 
will be of service to himself ; for then he may 
hope to replenish the purse that was depleted by 
the following tour. In that event he certainly 
never will regret taking that tour or repent of 
being the author of these Chips and Wafers. 
Saratoga Springs, May 1st, 1887. 





GENEBAL BOULANGEB, FBENCH MINISTEB OP WAB. 



FROM SARATOGA TO CARLSBAD. 

I went nearly all the way from Saratoga to Carls- 
bad in the AUer, of the German Lloyd. A new, 
rapid, clean, and well-captained steamer is the 
AUer, and the ocean calmed at her approach, so 
that fe\v of as missed our meals or lost (Mir temper. 
The voyage was without adventure or even inci- 
dent. There were no matrimonial contracts entered 
into and hut lew whales were seen. We had only 
one sunset and only one phosphorescent sea, but 
the Restless Club were on hoard from port to port, 
and. untied many a knotty question over their hard- 
tack and Apollinaris water. 

The Restless Club is never so much at home 
When it is at sea. Fairly upon the water, it feels 
itseli upon solid ground, since nowhere can it find 
its fundamental canon more opportune or pat — 
"Anywhere hut where we are; nothing can he 
worse than this." 

The sea is the mosl restless portion of the earth's 
surface, although it would he difficult to prove that 
it travels any faster around the sun or around its 
axis than the sands of New Jersey or the mud of 
Missouri. We are whirling heels over head through 
space at the rate of a thousand miles a minute. 

The uniformity with which Mr. Glauber's salts 



14 SAEATOGA CHIPS. 

pervade the ocean is owing to its restlessness. If 
it should cease to be restless, its chloride of sodium 
would gather into a mass as big at the bottom as 
the Continent of Europe, and as high at the top as 
the top of Mont Blanc ; the mineral springs at 
Saratoga and Carlsbad and their advertisements 
would dry up, and there would be an additional duty 
placed upon chloride of sodium. 

Eestlessness is the normal condition of every- 
thing and everybody, a fact that would be evident 
i£ there were not a Normal School in the United 
States. 

If human nature is of a piece with the rest of 
nature, and that it is all nature cries aloud, it 
would naturally share in the restless disposition of 
the hurrying cloud and the darting swallow, imitat- 
ing the swallow not only in being always on the 
wing, but in being at its best when it is arrayed 
like a gentleman and a waiter. 

It was just as much restlessness that caused 
George Fox to wear his hat in the presence of the 
King as it is restlessness that keeps the hats of the 
Bohemians flying through the air at the approach 
of Francis Joseph and his retinue. 

Luther was restless, or he never would have 
thrown his inkstand at the devil, and Jennie Ged- 
des must have been, or she would not have flung 
her little stool at her preacher's head. 

Eestlessness invented printing, discovered chloro- 
form and America. If Columbus had stayed at 



FROM SARATOGA TO CARLSBAD. 15 

home, he never would have gone abroad. But for 
him the corrupt aborigines would be basking in 
the dark lantern of Liberty enlightening New York 
where the conscript fathers keep the noiseless 
tenor of their way on their way to Canada or Sing 
Sing. 

If Dante had remained upon earth to compose his 
verse, he would have found abundance of material 
in " these restless spirits, ever hurried on by the 
swift wings of" — cheap tickets. Beatrice would 
have been delighted to see Cook's drove tumbling 
over one another through the galleries and panting 
breathlessly up and down the Matterhorn. 

The Restless Club differs from all other clubs, 
whether serious or political. It acts upon the spur 
of the moment, or the spur of the mountain, in - 
sion or out of session, and it invariably acts for the 
greatest good of the smallest number, no matter 
how little may be gained. 

It boycotted the prunes on the steamer, and modi- 
tied their importunity, and ought to have done the 
same by the band in the corner of the cabin when 
it passed round its hat, since that would have been 
a fine opportunity for taking sides with the manly 
cause of Wages as against the sneaking cause of 
Gratuities. It frowned upon the young lady who 
thrust her table-knife down her pretty throat and 
imitated her husband in wearing a toothpick in 
her mouth between meals. It cleared up a mys- 
tery on board by which a certain couple were set 



16 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

apart by the gossips as a runaway match, neither 
of whom had ever been divorced. Much to our 
annoyance, it was not even an unhappy match. 

I landed at Bremen. I had not been in Northern 
Europe for about one thousand years, when I was 
there in the loins of a Gothic barbarian in full 
dress, and in a physical condition that precluded 
the necessity of the Carlsbad Treatment. I imagine 
him a stately chief with tusks, smacking his chops 
over the broth of a boy that he sees cooking down 
in, Gaul, and presently he will descend upon the 
coasts of the Mediterranean and the British Isles, 
and plant himself there to grow into the silk hats 
and kid gloves that came over in the Aller to seek 
their health where he never lost his. 

Often as I had been in Europe, I had never seen 
Berlin — Berlin, the new capital of the mighty Ger- 
man, whither now all the tribes of the Teutons go 
up, sturdy and metaphysical, and full of beer and 
sauerkraut. I was with the French army that set 
out from Paris for Berlin in 1870, under the Na- 
poleonic son of the Dutch admiral, crying, Vive 
VEmpereur! and "Onto Berlin!" 1886! and 1 
have just reached Berlin, and the French army has 
" fallen back for another spring, and a vigorous 
leap may shortly be the result." 

But the destruction of the statue of the great 
Frederick the Great by the troops of General 
Boulanger will never be the result. The only 
Frenchman who could carry the " Car of Victory," 



FROM SARATOGA TO CARLSBAD. 17 

or ride in it from Berlin to Paris, is still asleep 
under the gilded dome of the Invalides, and he had 
no Frencli blood in his veins ; but there has been 
more than one German capable of bringing it back 
and replacing it on the Brandenberg Gate, where 
I saw it decorated with the Eagle of Prussia and 
armed with the iron cross. 

You will be surprised to meet so frequently on 
the beautiful Untev den Linden the French phy- 
sique and accent. He is a descendant of the 
exile driven out by that crowned Beelzebub, horn's 
XIV., who seized in 1<;7<> the Lorraine, that in 
1870 was reseized by Germany. 

Every European capital has its menagerie. You 
may enjoy your sanguinary reflections as you stroll 
among the tigers and wild cats at the Herlin Zoo <>r 
among the military effigies in the avenues and parks. 

Berlin is a camp of great commanders in bronze, 
while its gardens are fertile with the rank and file 
who followed them. Women come in on the im- 
posing statue of Frederick, to represent the virtues 
which never fail of votive offerings, however deli- 
cient they may be in military votaries — 

Prudence, 

Justice, 

Fortitude, 

Temperance. 

The galleries, too, and the museums remind you 
perpetually of the method pursued by the human 



18 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

carnivora for settling their disputes. Art and science 
are in league with the beasts of the field. Berlin 
has a garrison larger than the entire army and navy 
of the United States of America. Before you cross 
the street you must look both ways for cavalry, as 
in our quiet streets at home you must " look out 
for the locomotive when the whistle blows." 

I saw a troop of cavalry riding over a field cov- 
ered with women harvesting the grain. The 
women looked at the cavalry, the cavalry did not 
look at the women. Yes, one of the cavalrymen 
leered at one of the young women. Those peas- 
ants support those gay boys on horseback, and are 
trampled under foot of horse and man in return. 

A German who shared the scene with me said, 
" That is the curse of Germany. That makes me a 
Socialist. Strip those beggars of their lace and 
steel and send them home, and the common people 
would rise to something better ; but there is no 
hope for them, for those horses' heels are on their 
necks. ' ' 

Such are the Goths and Yandals and Angles at this 
day. A few of them are born on horseback, carbine 
in hand ; the rest are born under the horses' hoofs, 
with nothing in their hands or mouths. The claws 
of the baboon have evolved into the bayonets of 
man. While the jaguar and negro of Africa live 
in peace, except when they are roused and riled by 
an exploring expedition, the civilization of Europe 
is in a sanguinary ferment, while we are fortifying 



FROM SARATOGA TO CARLSBAD. 10 

oar coasts against, not the Hottentot or hyena, but 
our civilized fellow-creatures of " the same lan- 
guage, literature, and law," who may any night 
land upon our coast and overrun New Jersey. 

I was glad of the relief afforded by the shop- 
from these scenes and thoughts of carnage. N 
to veritable shopping with the ladies I enjoy look- 
ing into shop-windows for diversion and recreation. 
It is to be compared with a night's Bleep or a 
mountain climb. 

I asked a titled lady of ran; attainments what she 
thought of St. Petersburg, and her eves glistened 

as she exclaimed, ik Oh, miles and miles of shop- 
Europe still puts its shoe's out at the bedroom 
door in the evening, and finds them there in the 
morning polished. America warns you that they 
are not safe there any more. Von must leave them 
With the rest of your jewelry in the hotel safe. 
This gives Boots an opportunity to charge you ten 
cents every time you sit down on his throne, and 
he prostrates himself abjectly before you and trie 
your foot. Then he blows his breath upon it, and 
rubs it, and makes it shine till you can see your 
face in it. What a satisfaction to a poor devil to spend 
his last dime on his devotee at the blacking-box ! 

Our interrogative countryman turns up at every 
turn. I met this one on the train. 



20 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

" How many children have you ?" 

" Eleven." 

" Oh ! I've only four, two girls and two boys. 
That's about the ticket for a family, you know. 
Let's see, by the way, who did you marry ?" 

" The great-granddaughter of George Washing- 
ton's first wife." 

" I want to know. Then, you are an American, 
ain't you ?" 

" Yes, on my stepmother's side." 

" Ah ! I knew you were an American. I never 
make a mistake on that racket, I can tell you." 

" Oh ! I misunderstood you. I thought you 
asked me if I were from South America." 

" Well, now. I want to know. So, then, you 
are a South American !" 

"Yes, on my granddaughter's side ; the rest is 
Scotch." 

"Yes? Well, do you know, I suspected there 
was Scotch blood on the inside of you the moment 
I laid eyes on you. What captain did you come 
over with ?" 

" Jinks — horse marines." 

' ' How long do you intend to — " But by this time 
we had reached Dresden, and I took good care to 
select a different hotel from the one favored by 
my inquisitive countryman. 

The next day I saw him coming, and I started 
on the full run. So did he ; but I lost him just as 
I heard him bawl, " Where are you stopping ?" 



FROM SARATOGA TO CARLSBAD. 21 

The American of the United States never rests 
until lie knows where his fellow-American " stops'" 
and how much it costs him to live. '* Size him 
up" is the slang of it. The great Republic is im- 
pertinent. Monarchies do not care where you sleep 
or what you had for dinner, or, alas ! whether any- 
body except themselves had any dinner. 

There are intellectual swallow-tails at swell din- 
ner parties in London that came out of lodgings in 
the Strand. 

I spent two delightful days at Dresden, where 1 
am told rich Americans go to live cheaply, and boast 

of it. Curious mania that of those who have more 
money than they know what to do with, seeking 
out ways and means and places for not spending it ! 

I spent some of my poverty in a teacup of Dres- 
den china, and then made the tour of the Dresden 
Gallery. The most interesting pictures of a gallery 
are those who are looking at them. I can quite 
understand Michael Angelo finding his Madonna on 
the roadside in Italy. 

An old German and his granddaughter inter- 
rupted my study of the Murillos. The little 
granddaughter hopped about, chirping and hum- 
ming to herself, while the grandfather gazed sol- 
emnly upon the ancient works of art. Put her in 
marble and stand her in a corner of this gallery, 
and everybody would stop to gaze, and wonder, 
and admire. Her nose, and neck, and mouth, and 



22 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

chin, and ear, and forehead, and ankles were the 
perfection of sculptuary neatness. Her flaxen hair 
was like the tassel of the young corn for softness 
and gloss. She answered my smile with a smile of 
her own, showing her white and even teeth and 
her large, kind eyes of heavenly blue. She was all 
symmetry and grace. Best and worst of all — oh, 
happy, unhappy moment — she recalled what I had 
lost and made an old wound bleed afresh, and I 
hurried from her and from the wonderful gallery. 

"Sight-seeing for the sake of enumerating the ob- 
jects you have seen gets to be so dazing at last that 
it brings on paralysis of the optic nerve and de- 
lirium of the appreciative faculty. You get home 
to find yourself crammed with a tangled mass of 
unassorted and indigestible information. 

The good traveller is a ruminant. He lays away 
the landscape and the architecture, the odd charac- 
ter and the grand picture, the conversation and the 
street scene, to chew upon and digest in after times 
of leisure. 

Travelling promotes a mirageous imagination. 
His paradise is always just beyond the happy carpet- 
bagger. He can see it plainly. It may be an hal- 
lucination to others, it is a reality to him. He 
pursues a city in the sky or an island in the air. 
His city has no plumbers and his island no mias- 



FROM SARATOGA TO CARLSBAD. 23 

mas. He will presently put up at an inn where the 
cooking is fit for the palate of the immortals and 
the beds such as permanently cure the weariness of 
the sons of men. 

The first impression of Carlsbad is very diverting. 
The Treatment begins with that sense of diversion 
in the Cur-guest from the United States of America. 
The narrow streets, the ancient-looking houses, the 
overhanging hills, the broad German faces, the 
picturesque petticoats of the ladies who have lus- 
cious plums for sale, the obsequiousness of Tips in 
full uniform, as he bids you welcome to the Hotel 
von Zwieback, the little bunch of a feather bed and 
the feather pillow about the size of your fist that 
have been handed down from the Slav of the 
Steppes of Tartary, who put up at this inn five 
hundred years ago— it is a droll old burgh and very 
fascinating, and in that fascination the Treatment 
takes root. You feel better already. The Treat- 
ment lias begun. 




" OVERWEIGHT." 




THE CARLSBAD TREAT- 
MENT. 

The Carlsbad Treatment is 
rational, flexible, and adroit. It 
is at once exacting and indulgent 
to the morbid vertebrate in his 
grapple with the innumerable 
maladies that grow with his 
growth in enlightenment and 
enfeeblement. 

First of all, a diagnosis. You 
are stripped and laid prone upon 
the sofa, and then you are in- 
formed how it is with your 
heart, liver, spleen, kidneys, in- 
testinal canal, your digestive 
apparatus, and your thinking 
apparatus. The report will be 
as abundant in tact as that 
of the phrenologist who 
catalogues your bumps or 
that of the gypsy who prog- 
nosticates your future and 
your fortune. Admonition 
is adroitly mixed with encouragement, military or- 
ders with words of friendly counsel, stern rebuke with 




26 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

taffy. But have a care how you repeat the felici- 
tous or facetious phraseology of your diagnosis. 
One Cur-guest told another that her medical doctor 
had told her that her heart sounded like a church - 
bell, and that she would live for one hundred and 
thirty-two years for all there was the matter with 
her heart. 

" Why, that is exactly what he told me, word 
for word !" 

Fortified by your knowledge of your interior, and 
coached with reference to what you must do about 
it, you enter upon the far-famed Carlsbad Treat- 
ment, and it will do you no harm, meanwhile, to 
exclaim with Zola, " How jolly life is !" and agree 
with Kenan in calling this "an amusing age." 
The journey is worth all it costs, if it cures you of 
wanting to be cured. 

There is, of course, exceptional treatment for ex- 
ceptional " cases," which are sometimes so excep- 
tional that the Treatment is quarantine, banishment, 
or burial. We will not go into those " cases." 

For the common run of cases, for idiopathic dys- 
pepsia and dyspepsia that was not brought on by 
idiocy, it is fundamental that the patient or Cur- 
guest shall obey his physician in all things ; and for 
the common run of bad livers, and high livers, and 
American dyspeptics, this is about the latitude and 
longitude of the famous Carlsbad Treatment, as re- 
quired by the Carlsbad medical doctor, from whose 
decisions there is no appeal. 




A sight to see and a scene to remember. 



THE CARLSBAD TREATMENT. 29 

Up, and dressed, and drinking at 6.30 a.m. You 
drink, and walk, and keep step to the music of the 
splendid band of experts in the magnificent Sprudel 
Colonnade, unless, indeed, your doctor exiles you to 
the Schlossbrunn, where you are lucky if you do 
not find two hundred and seventy-two people in the 
line ahead of you at 6.15 a.m. That line is a sight 
to see and a scene to remember, for in that line, 
passing down the stone steps to hand their cups 
to the agile little nymph at the spring, and pass- 
ing up and out on the opposite steps, is an enormous 
variety of the morbid vertebrata, pathetically and 
humorously suggestive to the last degree. 

A still larger and more entertaining variety you 
will see and join when you take your place in the 
promenade at the famous Sprudel Spring. There 
each is served in turn as the crowd gathers around 
the great circular reservoir, and has his cup dipped 
into the boiling crater at the end of a long pole 
by the small maiden, who is an adept with the 
dipper. 

By 6.30 a.m. the vast colonnade is crammed with 
people of all ages, sexes, nations, costumes, com- 
plexions, and diseases. Those who are too old or 
too infirm to join the promenade sit and sip upon 
the benches. The rest sip as they stroll along in 
silence, broken here and there by a chat in under- 
tone or by some of us foreigners in overtone. The 
flowers that bloom in profusion all about you are 
hardly more quiet in their demeanor than the vast 



30 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

throng that are so careful not to injure or molest 
them. No behavior could be more in accord with 
the rules of etiquette to be found in the books or 
in the unwritten code of good society. One word 
to your adjoining Cur-guest, and he salutes you in a 
manner to gain your confidence at once. Fall into 
conversation with him, and he will overflow with 
information, and part with you as graciously as 
though you were his lifelong friend. If any one 
stares, he comes from the United Kingdom or the 
United States. 

The crowd continues to gather, and finally over- 
flows into the narrow streets and covers the bridge 
that spans the Tepel, which hurries along beneath 
your feet, as though impatient to escape from the 
volcano that snores under its waves. I never could 
quite get rid of the sensation at Carlsbad of under- 
going its Treatment in a boiler that might at any 
moment burst. 

If you have jolly companions — and you should 
have, if you wish to make the most of the Carlsbad 
Treatment — you will exchange comments on this 
wonderful human menagerie, with their odd and 
sad, their repelling and attractive and perplexing 
faces. This is part of the mental abstraction that 
constitutes a potent element in the efficacy of the 
Treatment. It is the Diversion Cure. 

You must walk for ten or fifteen minutes be- 
tween glasses, which are two, or three, or four in 
number, according to the advice of your doctor, 



THE CARLSBAD TREATMENT. 31 

who also dictates the spring from which you are to 
drink, and without winking at you, either ! 

The springs differ in temperature rather than in 
constituents, and differ just enough to furnish the 
adroit faculty another opportunity for working the 
element of fussiness in the treatment of the morbid 
vertebrata. A fussy patient needs a fussy physi- 
cian, and never fails to find one. 

In about an hour or three quarters of an hour, 
say about 8 a.m., you sit down to your frugal break- 
fast out-of-doors ! Out-of-doors, out-of doors al- 
ways, if the weather will allow of it. Out-of-doors 
is a part of the Treatment. It is man, the only in- 
door animal, the only over-civilized animal, revert- 
ing to and resorting to the Open- Air Cure. It is 
living, and breathing, and having your being in the 
open air, where we used to live when we were lower 
down, and where branches of our own interesting 
human species live now in perfect health, without 
the aid of opiates, stimulants, or cathartics. 

A frugal break-the-fast it is to the present reign- 
ing family of native Americans, fresh from the land 
of multitudinous dishes and multifarious cuisine. 
The Treatment breakfast consists of one cup of milk, 
or tea, or coffee, a couple of soft-boiled eggs, and a 
roll, or some zwieback, which is simply bread re- 
baked, and a nutritious invention it is. 

The observing foreigner will observe that there 
is nothing novel or local about this Carlsbad break- 
fast. It is the breakfast of the Continent and the 



32 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

islands adjacent thereunto. The great American 
breakfast is unknown out of the United. States of 
America. No European, biped or quadruped, car- 
nivorous or omnivorous, ever ate half an ox before 
noon. The Roman subdued, the world on goat's- 
milk breakfasts and the Briton on breakfasts of 
bacon and the worst cup of coffee known out of the 
almshouse. The Spartan did his lighting on cheese 
and olives. The Esquimau is easily licked, because 
he lives on fat, and is all blubber. 

Between breakfast and dinner the Treatment 
walks you all over the glorious hills and under the 
sheltering trees that surround the quaint and curi- 
ous town ; or you may loiter about the pretty shop- 
windows, and amuse yourself and annoy the shop- 
keeper by asking the price of what you do not in- 
tend to buy ; or you may lounge on the benches of 
the parks or promenades and read a story of some 
human life, if not written by a harrowing French 
romancer or an exasperatingly minute novelist of 
the later American period, who reminds you of the 
chap with a microscope in his eye trying to find out 
what is the matter with your watch. 

You are forbidden to converse upon your busi- 
ness affairs, upon your ills, aches, or accidents, your 
mistakes, or misfortunes, or matrimonial misalli- 
ances. You must talk of cheerful matters. The 
mind must be kept away from itself and its taber 
nacle of clay. This is where the Mind Cure comes 
in. You go all the way to Carlsbad to bring it in 






THE CARLSBAD TREATMENT. 33 

and carry it out. Perhaps you must get away from 
home to get away from yourself. Travel is an anti- 
dote of brooding. 

Leave off introspection, especially if that is really 
your only disease. Introspection breeds morbidity, 
and morbidity hypochondria, and the hypochon- 
driac sincerely believes that he may disobey God's 
laws if he is only employed in God's service. In 
his country's army he would not think of such a 
thing, or if he did, he would have only one oppor- 
tunity of trying it. Sincerity is the crank's curse 
and egotism the bane of the devout dyspeptic. 
Look unto the hills, and walk over the hills of Carls- 
bad, from whence cometh help in the very act of 
looking for it. 

In pursuance of cheerfulness you will not need to 
exclude that purveyor of bad news, the newspaper. 
It excludes itself. It gets so far behind that it 
never catches up. The English daily vexes the 
American from the United States, by omitting the 
bad news from the United States, while his es- 
teemed contemporaries of New York are so stale 
that it is too late for him to enjoy the first thrill of 
their horrible information, and he soon loses all in- 
terest in the runaway matches, the tariff on wool, 
and the election of boodleman in his native ward. 

If you are ordered to bathe in vapor, minerals, 
pine burrs, iron water, carbonic-acid gas, butter- 
milk, or mud, you will be expected to do so at 
about 10 a.m., when you are supposed to be regular 



34 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

in pulse and serene in mind. Carlsbad prescribes 
Quakerism for the nervous system. You must study 
to be quiet, and mind your own business, especially 
now that you have no business of your own to 
mind. Carlsbad proclaims peace on earth to men 
of good will. If you are good-natured, you may 
bathe. 

The mud or moor bath is a half hour of your ex- 
istence upon earth spent up to your chin in the 
earth itself. The gritty black peat is impregnated 
with minerals, and heated according to the necessi- 
ties of your scrofula or gout, rheum or rheumatism, 
obstinacy or meanness. More of this in our chap- 
ter on Baths, 

At about one o'clock p.m. there is the eating of 
the second meal, under the banner of Moderation 
in All Things, which you never eat under at home, 
lest you should be deprived of the privilege of eat- 
ing under it four thousand miles away from home. 

The prodigal son comes to himself when he comes 
to the table at Carlsbad. That is the cunning of 
the Carlsbad Treatment. It brings one to one's 
self. It is a long way with some. 

You may have a soup for dinner, if not too rich, 
and any kind of fish, and any kind of meat, except 
pork. Some Americans have been turned back at 
the frontier on account of the laws interdicting 
" the American hog." You may have any kind of 
vegetables and any kind of fruit, if cooked. You 
may drink any of the table waters, or any one of 






THE CARLSBAD TREATMENT. 35 

the light wines, or lager beer. Pilsiner beer is a 
favorite. Spirits (brandy and whiskey) are abso- 
lutely prohibited as a beverage, and are adminis- 
tered by the doctor of medicine very much as the 
knife is administered when amputation is neces- 
sary. 

Everything calculated to create acidity in the stom- 
ach, whether sweet or sour, whether a plum-pud- 
ding or a newspaper, is forbidden ; all spices, sauces, 
candies, fats and grease, and everything in the way 
of edible, beverage, or sensational novel that would 
give the digestive organs a sudden paroxysm of 
heat or chill. Ice-cream and buckwheat cakes, hot 
rolls and iced water would necessitate the reading of 
the riot act. An American from the United States 
who was exhibiting in the familiar pantomime of 
dining on lumps of ice and coals of fire was given 
till the next train time to leave town, and the pickle- 
eater was put into the pound with the lost pups. 
Butter is looked upon in Carlsbad with even more 
suspicion than it is in New York, while an order 
for oleomargarine renders a man liable to incarce- 
ration in Elbogen Castle, and the great American 
dessert of pie- crust, hickory-nuts, and toothpicks 
would incur the penalty of assault and battery, with 
intent to do away with the digestive apparatus en- 
tirely. 

No after-dinner nap, unless you are sufficiently 
far gone to have it prescribed by the humor-us 
doctor of medicine. You will not feel like nap- 



30 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

ping. You have not eaten enough to make you 
feel like it. Over-eating is forbidden, and gorman- 
dizing, and guzzling, and bolting. You go to 
Carlsbad in order to learn to eat slow and chew 
small, and the lesson is worth all it costs in sea-sick- 
ness and home-sickness. For the first time in his 
life the rabid-transit American eater from the 
United States chews his food, and for the first time 
tastes it and relishes it. He can now distinguish 
tenderloin from terrapin, horse soup from mulli- 
catawny. For the first time, in consequence, the 
enfranchised citizen of the great Republic thinks 
with a clear brain, talks without hysterics, and 
sleeps without nightmare. 

I have invented a device for preventing the fatal 
habit of fast eating — a mirror so placed as to com- 
pel the eater to see himself swallow as others see 
him swallow — without chewing. 

Carlsbad has an eye to keeping an eye on the 
foreign patient, and securing the return of the pa- 
tient foreigner. He is to be managed. All Treat- 
ment, whether mineralogical or Thomsonian, is fish- 
ing for men with a net, and not with hook and line 
or procrustean bedsteads. Tact is the attainment 
for a physician. 

" Do you smoke ?" 

"Yes." 

"How many ?" 

" Nine cigars a day." 

" Make it three at once, then two, then one, then 



THE CARLSBAD TREATMENT. 37 

none ! Nicotine does not go well with chloride of 
sodium." 

The Carlsbad Treatment is a weaning method. It 
weans the morbid mammal from his bottle with an- 
other bottle and allows him time for easing off 
from his Havanas, but he must be weaned or lost. 
Weaning is not weaning unless you are really 
weaned. 

The snuffer is disinfected and sequestered until 
the habit is abandoned and the nose restored to its 
original hue and proportions, while the Member of 
Congress who deliberately chews tobacco of his own 
free will and accord, and not as a punishment for 
crime, is compelled gently but sternly to stand and 
receive the contents of the hose of the steam fire- 
engine in his animated mouth. One complained 
that it took his breath away, and he was told that 
that was the object of it. 

As spitting is exclusively an American habit., it is 
forbidden only to Americans. All nations smoke, 
ours is the only one that spits while it smokes. 

The appetizing toothpick is not on the bill of 
fare, and the still more appetizing habit of using it 
behind the napkin, and sometimes not behind the 
napkin, does not yet prevail except in the United 
Kingdom, the United States, and among the United 
Order of Terra del Fuegians ! You are required to 
turn your mouth away from the table when you 
cough. 

You stroll, lounge, chat, or read till the hour for 



38 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

tea, which comes at about 6 p.m., without bringing 
any tea with it. English is the only tongue in 
which the teapot sings. The Welsh are the only 
British who do not speak British who will get up 
in the middle of the night to take a cup of tea. 
The Germans don't know how to make it. The 
French despise it. 

My lady said to a Parisian lady, " Don't you ever 
drink tea?" 

" Oh, yes, when we wish to perspire." 

Carlsbad prescribes milk, beer, or vin ordinaire 
for the. evening meal, with the ever-recurring zwie- 
back and a ration of cold meat. 

You will read this bill of fare of a day at Carls- 
bad underestimating its indulgence, but when you 
come to try it you will be surprised to find it satis- 
factory, even to a gourmand. All its foods are good, 
and it is enough, and enough is as good as a feast. 

This is the Enough Cure. 

The evening of the Treatment dawns early and 
sets soon. At 6.30 the beautiful new theatre opens 
with a drama which is designed to amuse the Cur- 
guest, and it will do so, even if he does not under- 
stand a word of it. Pantomime is as much to some 
as the text is to others. If it is an opera on the 
boards, it will be as entertaining, even if it is as 
inarticulate, as the scientific melody in the choir-loft 
at home. 

The balls, and hops, and concerts all come off, and 
leave off early in the evening. Restrained amuse- 



THE CARLSBAD TREATMENT. 39 

ment is a factor of the Treatment. It is the Pleas- 
ure Cure that you go four thousand miles from 
your home, sweet home, to try. But the pleasure 
is made for man, not man for pleasure — only ! 

The goddess Hygeia has taken away the bravery 
of their tinkling ornaments, the changeable suits of 
apparel, and the wimples and the crisping-pins. The 
Chinese Minister at Washington could attend the 
balls at Carlsbad without being shocked by the 
limited liability of the fashionable costume. 

Your Treatment is over for the day when you 
find yourself wrestling with the Dutch bedquilt for 
the night. It is all one mass — quilt, sheet, and all 
— and you awake to find yourself strangling in a 
horse-collar and your bare legs working like the 
paddles of a windmill in the midnight air of beauti- 
ful Bohemia. 

The Carlsbad Treatment does not, like the quack 
medicine, profess to cure everybody of every mal- 
ady, from toothache to trichina. It emphasizes 
particularly disorders of the intestines, the stomach, 
the liver, and the kidneys, though Bright's disease 
it does not undertake, and is very reticent in the 
presence of inherited gout or melancholy heredity. 
From the mind diseased it turns hopelessly away, 
but grapples courageously with a disordered imag- 
ination. 

Carlsbad does not promise to restore a leg by a 
bath in the Sprudel, however patriotic may have 
been the reason for its loss, or to furnish a new lung 



40 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

by a three- weeks' diet of zwieback, or to extinguish 
the flame on a tippler's nose by a mud bath or a 
band of music. 

Carlsbad makes a distinction between alleviation 
and cure, between the cranks or the chronics, and 
those who are healthily and hopefully out of re- 
pair. 

The goddess of Carlsbad is Hygeia, not her sister, 
that other daughter of ^Esculapius, Panacea. Carls- 
bad is shy of drugs, and seems to administer them 
as alcohol and hallucinations are administered, ac- 
cording to the hold they have on the stomach or 
the cerebellum, of their victim. Your German doc- 
tor of medicine hates medicine. Druggists have 
no drugs. An apothecary-shop in America is a 
curiosity-shop to a German chemist. There seems 
to be no pathies at Carlsbad — alio, electro, hydro, 
or homeo — and no discussion of them. 

Nothing is ascribed to sorcery or incantation, 
magic or miracle, although the grateful Cur-guest 
may attribute his recovery to whatever his educa- 
tion may necessitate or his imagination may invent. 
The privileges and prejudices guaranteed to the in- 
dividual vine and fig-tree are taken for granted. 
There is no toleration. There is silence. 

And so while, I suppose, a lancet could be found, 
if one were needed, and perhaps bleeding would 
not be denied to the over-blooded, and possibly the 
knife is tried, if the man's head must come off to 
save his life, for the average morbid vertebrate, as 



THE CARLSBAD TREATMENT. 



41 



he comes and goes at Carlsbad, the Treatment is hot 
minerals, open air, wholesome food, mastication, 
regular exercise, and the continual feast of a con- 
tented mind. 

Sensible Carlsbad ! 




STRAY WAFERS. 

You never fail to wonder and exclaim over this 
hot-headed freak of nature as you sip your boiling 
Sprudel and keep step with the Greek priest and 
the Arab sheik in the hygienic promenade. 

How can yon doubt that you are drinking from 
the crater of a volcano, while you hear the roar 
below and look upon the hot and fitful ebullitions, 
no two of which are equal in height ? Where is 
there a volcano of lava more whimsical or capri- 
cious ? 

It has several times ceased its eruptions, and the 
possibility of its doing so again must keep the au- 
thorities and the lessee of the waters in a perpetual 
state of nervous apprehension, while the Cur-guest 
must lie awake on his wretched Dutch bed, expect- 
ing every moment in this world to be his next in 
another. 

In 1620 it disappeared altogether, and again in 
1770, and reappeared in a new spot, as sulky as a 
political leader who abandons his principles as soon 
as they cease to be rewarded by emoluments. 

Nor is it deficient in those serious consequences 
that constitute the respectability of a riot or an 
earthquake to a newspaper reporter. In 1799 it 



44 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

celebrated Washington's birthday by an eruption 
that resulted in a very respectable amount of dam- 
age, for it actually brought the Mineral- Water 
Treatment to an end. During the earthquake at 
Lisbon, in 1755, it ceased to flow. 

What facts are these for corroborating the fact 
that the central fires of the shooting star upon 
which we ride have considerable to do with, not 
only the heating, but the eruption and distribution, 
of the mineral nectar to which we are indebted for 
our improved digestion and repaired temper. 

When the earthquake shook Icernia, in 1805, all 
the Carlsbad Springs ceased to flow, and for several 
hours on the 26th of July not a drop could the 
Cur-guest get. In 1809 the Sprudel had another 
blow-out that exceeded anything it had attempted 
before, and was quite equal to any of the eruptions 
of Thomas Carlyle, which, by the way, would be 
a very appropriate name for an extinct volcano 
or for one in a constant state of eruption. 

At that manifestation the basin was blown up and 
blown to pieces, the Schlossbrunn vanished, and 
the spring came to the surface, a few feet away, that 
is now known as the Hygeia, which shot up sud- 
denly and as high as the tops of the houses. It is 
pleasant to be thus reminded that we are flying 
through space on a planet on fire at its core — an 
incidental circumstance that may explain and excuse 
the " nervous prostration " of the only animal that 
knows enough of his environment to be nervous 
about it. 



STRAY WAFERS. 47 

As the earthquake is now one of our institu- 
tions, it is important to note the part played in this 
sensational disturbance by one of the most preva- 
lent and potent ingredients in mineral waters — car- 
bonic-acid gas. It may be called, indeed, the pri- 
mordial constituent. The rocks are rent, the surface 
is lifted, and cities are lifted with it, to allow the 
carbonic-acid gas to escape from its imprisonment. 
The escape of the gas creates the spring. The erup- 
1ions of Vesuvius contain a large per cent of car- 
bonic-acid gas, which sometimes exhales from the 
ground in the vicinity of the mountain, when it is 
not in the act of dynamiting those who least de- 
serve such punishment. Buzhan Bhota, in Thibet, 
is rendered impassable by the discharge of the car- 
bonic-acid gas, which also fatally poisons the atmos- 
phere of the valley of the upas-tree in Java. 

The Sprudel is the spring nearest to the cauldron 
of hot carbonic-acid gas that rages under Carlsbad 
and sputters in its streets. Round about the caul- 
dron go the variegated birds of passage from every 
clime, their chatter mixing with the rumble from 
the reservoir below. Every man of lis is a natural 
convulsion on his own account. We might be 
shamed into suppressing our anger if we could re- 
alize that we are simply bilious volcanoes in a state 
of reprehensible eruption. 

Castles near by are constructed of the beautiful 
Sprudel stone, which is not simply the rock im- 
pregnated and colored by the Sprudel water, but 



43 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

seems to be the water itself turned into rock. It 
is not an incrustation ; it is a petrifaction. It 
miidit be called Glaubersaltstone. Over one million 
pounds of Glauber salts are manufactured annually 
from the water of the Sprudel. 

A very pleasant day it will be that you devote to 
a drive to the ruins of Engelliaua Castle and the 
castle of Elbogen. You will jog along through a 
picturesque region, and hear the echo of the driver's 
whip among some rugged rocks and pretty hills. 
The Tcpel Valley and the valley of the Eger arc 
exceedingly attractive. There is a group of tall 
rocks overhanging the Eger called Hans Ileiling 
Fels. The legend is that Hans Ileiling was jilted, 
and his sweetheart married another. Hans ap- 
peared at the marriage supper with the devil, who 
turned the bridal party into stone, since which time 
they have lived in a state of perfect compatibility. 

Engelhaus is crumbling on the top of a precipi- 
tous rock four hundred and sixty-eight feet high, 
and is traced to the twelfth century, and then be- 
comes lost, as Macaulay would say, " in the twilight 
of history. 1 ' 

The same may be said of Elbogen Castle, which 
is kept in repair for the purposes of a prison. This 
fact was impressed upon the tablet of my memory 
by the keeper, who led us down a winding and tor- 
tuous stone stairway to a dark cell, where he un- 



STRAY WAFERS. 49 

bolted an iron door, and threw the light of his bull's 
eye upon a man pacing to and fro in the darkness. 
Tf the murderer knew the way up the stairway, I 
am sure he could have secured his liberty, for all 
there was of physical strength in our party of two, 
and the keeper was not armed. I felt as pale as my 
comrade looked, and never was gladder to see the 
light of day than when we reached the jail-yard. 

We were shown a beaker full of silver farthings. 
This signifies that in 1352 Charles IV. freed the 
town of Elbogen of taxes, and commanded that this 
beaker of silver farthings be handed to liim or any 
other Emperor of Austria that should visit the place. 

But far more interesting than the crowned heads 
who visited here, and gave away what did not be- 
long to them, was the meteoric stone that arrived 
here from some other planet, or it was the nebula 
of another planet which lost its balance in the course 
of its evolution, and spent a hundred million of 
years in tumbling through space. It weighed one 
hundred and ten pounds, but it contained no in- 
scriptions or hieroglyphics to indicate where it 
came from, or how long it was on its way, or the 
theory upon which it started, continued, and stop- 
ped. We are strangers in a strange state of things. 

Man is a thirsty animal. His thirst conies early 
and lasts long. It is his first sensation and his 
last. " The tongue of the sucking child cleaveth 
to the roof of his mouth for thirst. " The dying 



50 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

are thirsty. One of them said, " Perhaps it is the 
thirst of death, ' ' and it was. We die of fever call- 
ing for water. Fever it is, a " feverish thirst " it 
is called. Man is too thirsty to be in good health. 
It comes of his environment. He is the only ani- 
mal who is obliged to earn his food and clothing by 
the sweat of his brow. The other vertebrata are 
born clothed and in their right mind, and find their 
food by seeking it. If ever they should become 
civilized they will appreciate their present advan- 
tages. 

Then the more we sweat the more we thirst 
and the deeper the fever strikes in. It is something 
of dismal significance, this thirst. No wonder it is 
made so much of as a religious metaphor. 

No severer punishment could be devised for Tan- 
talus than to be endowed with an insatiable thirst, 
and then compelled to stand in water which should 
recede from his lips whenever he attempted to 
drink it. 

What shall quench this consuming thirst of the 
human creature I What shall he drink ? This is 
the question that drives him hither and thither, and 
from one fountain to another, from one extreme 
to another. It is the despair of legislatioiii Man 
has more drinks than all the other animals put to- 
gether, from the sponge to the rhinoceros. They 
are content with mineral water, if they can get it ; 
with plain water, if they can find no other. But 
man's beverages have evolved from the translucent 



STRAY WAFERS. 51 

and refreshing fluid of the spring that bubbled out 
when Moses smote the rock to the eighty-seven 
decoctions of ' k the American bar," that steal away 
the brains or, like the cup of Circe, change men 
to swine. 

Here is where mineral water comes in as, to use 
the cry of the Eastern water-carrier, li the gift of 
God." It is man's best drink. It never contains 
malarial germs or typhoid poison. It has the 
quenching power of the pnmp without its decayed 
toads, and the twang of the evil fluids without their 
demoniacal effects. 

It acts as a corrective of the hanker after intoxi- 
cating beverages, and allays the fiery disease that 
burns up brawn and brain. That which Semiramis 
came upon in Ethiopia had so beneficent an effect 
that those who drank of it were constrained to con- 
fess their sins. If the waters of Carlsbad and Sar- 
atoga should have that result, what confessionals 
these Spas would become ! 

The children of Israel have builded themselves a 
very large and impressive synagogue at Carlsbad. 
I sat down among them during their Sabbath-morn- 
ing worship on Saturday. I recalled the Philadel- 
phia Quakers of my youth, and was not so offended 
by their hats as other Christians seem to be. Their 
form of worship is older than ours. Nevertheless, 
we are in bondage to the new idea that reverence 
takes off its hat to the Deity, as politeness does to a 



52 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

woman. I was quite pleased with the chanting of 
the rabbi. Ho reminded me of Pope Pins IX., 
whom I heard intone the service in St. Peter's dur- 
ing the sitting of the (Ecumenical Council. There 
is something in this rhymic melody that moves and 
soothes, whether you hear it in the Jewish syna- 
gogue, the Catholic cathedral, or the negro meet- 
ing-house. 

One cannot listen to these cadences in the syna- 
gogue without recalling the sad history and beauti- 
ful constancy of these scattered sheep of the Lord's 
fold. *I can think of them only as sitting and weep- 
ing by the rivers of Babylon, with their harps hang- 
ing on the willows, and answering their taunting 
captors with the pathetic words, " How shall we sing 
the Lord's song in a strange land ?" 

The Polish Jew, who is one of the first to attract 
your attention in the crowd at the Sprudel, reminds 
you of the fact that philanthropy is easy, if you 
never see the object of it. 

He is lean-fleshed and ill-favored. He is black 
from cap to boot, with the exception of his face, 
and that is darker than that of many a Congo. His 
eye is black, his hair is black, his beard is black 
and long, and his coat is black and longer. He 
wears corkscrew curls and top-boots. However 
little attention he may seem to give to his costume 
or his perfume, he is a dude now in comparison 
with what he was when he first came to try the 






STRAY AVAFERS. 53 

Sprudel for his coated tongue. He was as deficient 
in trousers as lie was abundant in filth, and emitted 
an odor of far-reaching and acute purport, until 
an ordinance was passed requiring him to put on his 
breeches, and take off his dirt at the town limits, 
and submit to a bath in eau de cologne. 

The Polish Jewess shaves her head when she 
marries, and substitutes a hideous black wig of an- 
other woman's hair for the beautiful black mane 
that she inherited from her ancestors who lived in 
the time of the great King Nebuchadnezzar. 

But your prejudice gives way to pity when you 
recall the history of the two peoples represented by 
these singular Cur-guests, the children of Poland 
and the children of Israel, both of whom have been 
despoiled and trampled out by all the Czars of all 
the Russias. Is it any wonder that the Polish 
Jews at Carlsbad keep carefully to themselves, 
never look up, or to the right or left, and have a 
hunted and a hated air? 

Is it any wonder that the Russian crown is insane 
with dread of the retribution that has pursued it for 
five centuries ? ''In thy skirts is found the blood 
of the souls of the poor innocents." 

Carlsbad, while the resort of the highest in rank, 
is the most democratic of watering-places. There 
is absolute liberty in costume. It is no place for 
display — for diamonds, and bare shoulders, and sil- 
ver-mounted harness. Princesses and duchesses ride 



54 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

over the mountains in the donkey-cart. Noblemen 
and statesmen haggle with the hackman over the 
fare to Giesshubl. 

It is amusing to see Carlsbad pluck the plumage 
from the airy genus United-Statesianus, with his 
eye-glasses of window-glass, his wast horizon of 
mustache, his overcoat dangling about his heels, 
and a coachman's cape about his shoulders, his silk 
hat on the back of his head to reveal his bang, and 
his vast assortment of sticks and alpen-stocks, and 
umbrellas and hat-boxes, and his piles on piles of 
luggage. 

Carlsbad, now so staid and moderate, was once, 
however, famous for the magnificence and hilarity 
of its entertainments. 

Kings and emperors came with troops and ban- 
ners, and gave elaborate festivities to the whole 
people, who were summoned at the top of the Deer 
Spring with trumpets and kettledrums, and enter- 
tained with fiddles, pipes, and ' horns. A prince 
would dress in the livery of his groom, and dance 
with the peasant girl. 

Where our rank is fixed we may do as we please 
with the rank below us. Augustus I., King of 
Poland, accompanied by his Queen, the beautiful 
Aurora, came to Carlsbad to be cured in 1691, and 
gave a great ball, and had the hot water of the 
Sprudel conveyed in pipes to the ball-room, and 



STRAY WAFERS. 55 

drenched the dancers ! Never after were they 
troubled with gout in the light fantastic toe. 

There were fetes innumerable, concerts, banquets, 
balls, balloon ascensions, chess tournaments, in 
which ^children in fancy costume were chessmen. 
It required sixty-six hundred horses to convey the 
Emperor Charles and his retinue to Carlsbad in 
1732. 

But those days are over, and the days of moder- 
ation in all things have come. Carlsbad has taken 
the festive garland from the brow of Bacchus and 
laid it upon the head of llygeia, who now feeds her 
snake on Mr. Glauber's salts, and sees that her wor- 
shippers say their prayers early in the morning and 
early in the evening. 

When you are weary, and lonely, and a trifle home- 
sick, as you sit, and sip, and watch the worshippers 
of Hygeia at the Sprudel, a feeling of sadness will 
creep into your sensibilities as the strains of music 
creep into your ears. Sit, Jessica ! Look how the 
floor of this colonnade is covered with the heroic 
Spartans in a hopeless fight ! " Fight thou there- 
fore bravely, and bid the other Greeks be brave." 

Here is the old dissipate who supposes he can get 
out of the hot water he has got into by putting the 
hot water into him. Here is the young blood whose 
blood is poisoned by nicotine or alcohol, who im- 
agines that he can restore what he has lost during 
the dissipation of ten years by sipping at the 



56 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

Sprudel fortliree weeks. Here is mamma's darling 
who expects to recover the vitality she has danced 
away, by a fortnight's diet of eggs and zwieback. 

Inherited maladies are to take flight at the first 
draught of chloride of sodium, and the lame man 
is to leap as a hart by bathing his cork leg in peat. 
Three weeks is expected to restore its natural 
hue to a nose that has required the half of life to 
illuminate. 

Here is an old countess who goes through all 
weathers in search of the elixir which is to restore 
her to the vigor that she probably lost by defying 
the laws which she is now trying to obey. She is 
carried to her bath, wrapped in rubber blankets, 
and often has a shower bath from the teasing hea- 
vens before she reaches the bath, which is to be of 
the earth earthy. 

Here is the miserable Cur-guest who expects to 
find the waters of Lethe in the glass that hangs 
about his neck. They will drown the memories of 
his sorrowful past ; and who would deny him the 
fulfilment of his wish ? 

Many a countenance is distressing enough, and 
when that face multiplies itself hundreds and hun- 
dreds of times, you will feel the force of the cour- 
ageous and pathetic struggle for existence into 
which we are all drafted. 

You will realize as you look upon the pallid cheek 
of youth, the furrowed brow of age, the child handi- 
capped with a club-foot, and the melancholy eye of 



GTRAY WAFERS. 57 

the broken in health, who are also broken-hearted, 
that the hope is a forlorn one, and for that reason 
alone as awfully sad as it is inexpressibly sublime. 
Every remedy is a crutch for a wounded hero. 

Ah me ! if the immortals see this fight of the 
heroic genus homo, they must many a time fill the 
heavens with a clamor of admiration. The trees of 
the fields clap their hands and the sweet heavens 
weep at the sight. Wonderful, marvellous strug- 
gle and wrestle of man with his environment and 
interiorment ! Has the universe of worlds and 
beings any other spectacle like this \ 

Gambling is forbidden at Carlsbad for two rea- 
sons and no third : first, because it interferes with 
the Treatment, and, second, because it is injurious to 
business, where the business is to provide tor the 
pleasure, comfort, or health of a vast number of 
visitors. The Cur-guest must not be excited and 
public order must not be endangered. Order is the 
first law of — property ! No moral considerations 
seem to be entertained. It is a question of expedi- 
ency and not of ethics. It is the same at all the 
great resorts of Germany. 

There is no more conclusive evidence of this than 
the fact that those who have investments in the 
gambling-places are allowed abundance of " notice 
to quit." Hights are acknowledged and property 
protected. 

The Teuton, whether Catholic or Lutheran, is 



58 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

not a Puritan or a Quaker. Puritanism is unintel- 
ligible to a German. He is seeking visitors and 
customers. He is working his mineral springs, and 
black forests, and dead towns, and crumbling castles 
for all they are worth to the tourist and Cur-guest 
in marks and guldens. Gambling is detrimental to 
this object. It is inexpedient. 

Policy conquers what morality might not have 
the courage to assail. Nor would morality have an 
army adequate for the assault. The gambler votes 
down gambling, the vicious insist that vice shall be 
conceajed, if they have any real estate to be de- 
preciatecl by it. 

There is no Socialistic experiment about Carls- 
bad, nothing of the fanaticism of trying to escape 
from the world by the fugitives who compose it, 
and who only aggravate the objections to it by re- 
stricting it to themselves. It is easier to get rid of 
the world by being a part of it than by constitut- 
ing the whole of it. Carlsbad is not a Brook-Farm 
or a Shaker village. It has no peculiar theories 
about money or matrimony. It is not a peninsula 
of society, but the mainland. 

Carlsbad has no appearance of a hospital. It 
does not offend the eye, or nose, or any other sense, 
or common sense with the odor of drugs or the 
concentration of deformities and maladies. This is 
precluded by the European aversion for bringing 



STRAY WAFERS. 59 

together people whom God has put asunder. No ; 
Carlsbad is not one vast hospital or a cluster of 
small hospitals, where the most formidable obstacle 
to recovery is the sight of those whose recovery is 
impossible. 

Their springs, like ours, are all in a valley. 

The valley of Jehoshaphat would have been found 
to be full of them, if Jehoshaphat had been a Sara- 
toga Yankee. 

All visitors used to be received with a flourish of 
trumpets. But that was done away with, because 
visitors arrived when other visitors were trying to 
sleep. 

It is a pleasant ride to the Giesshubler Spring 
when it does not rain pitchforks and hail hailstones, 
which it did when Joseph and I made the charming 
trip. I put some of the crystals, fresh from the 
clouds, into my glass of milk, fresh from the goat. 
That was the only time I ever had ice in my milk 
or water on the Continent of Europe since I first 
began to travel over it twenty years ago. 

Giesshubl attracts about eighteen thousand vis- 
itors annually, and it was bottling four millions 
of bottles annually while we were there. I was 
mortified to find them addressing the cases for the 
commercial capital of the United States of America 
with a small y — New york. 



60 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

Carlsbad has been benefited by those whom it 
has benefited. Monuments, rocks, and trees are 
written over with gratitude for health restored and 
mind composed. Whether clumsy poetry or Tin- 
grammatical prose, it is very touching and gratifying. 

As long ago as 1510 Dr. Von Bohnslau wrote a 
Latin ode to the wonderful cure, and in later times 
Goethe and Schiller, and many a lesser poet has 
written thankful pseans to the efficacy of the Treat- 
ment. 

Monarchs, and nobles, and wealthy merchants 
have contributed to the charities of the town or aided 
in increasing its attractions and conveniences. In 
a pretty nook amid the hills you come upon an ob- 
elisk called after Lord Finlater. He was a Scotch 
nobleman, who gave liberally to beautify the en- 
virons of the town and fill the treasury of its chari- 
ties. His gifts came of gratitude for the benefit he 
had derived from the waters, and this obelisk of 
the town's gratitude to him. 

One of the inscriptions left by a grateful Cur- 
guest, when few Americans had shinplasters enough 
left over from their fight for independence to pay 
the fare to Carlsbad, is : 

A. F. 

1798. 
divin Sprudel ! fontaine sacree / Riche present du Giel ! 

I sat down to rest upon the " Princesses' Seat," 
where three royal sisters of Austria once sat down 




.1 



the goddess hygeia. — "She drives away the evils of languor 
and weakness— without her beauty cannot exist." 



STRAY WAFERS. 63 

to rest, and I meditated upon the uneasy heads in 
the " Empresses' Seat," where the wife of Francis 
I. doubtless fell into the same line of reflection in 
L810. 

Near by i; the Friend's Seat," where a Russian 
count and a Russian admiral used to sit and chat, 
I saw an inscription in French to the goddess 
Ilygeia : " She drives away the evils of languor and 
weakness — without her beauty cannot exist.' 1 

In the glorious days of Greece and Rome whoever 
wished to win public approbation and benefit the 
town erected thermae, or edifices for warm baths. 
They were commodious, imposing, and costly. 
There were spaces and apartments for gymnastics, 
games, and intellectual entertainments, free library, 
and conversation. They were the resort of rulers, 
poets, statesmen, and orators. Agrippa, Titus, 
Caracalla, and Diocletian presented thermae to the 
people. 

What an opportunity Saratoga Springs oilers to 
benevolent wealth and public enterprise for such a 
project ! They need not attempt a rivalry with the 
baths of Caracalla in costliness and magnificence, 
but they might bless the great spa and through it an 
innumerable number of people with a noble and 
ample Temple of Health, Art, Science, Amuse- 
ment, and Instruction. 

The Saratoga Athenaeum, with its Greek name 
and classic associations, affords an admirable basis 
for such a benefaction. 



HI SARATOGA CHIPS. 

When the Children of Light como into their in- 
lieritance no Saratogian will think of closing the 
season without doing something to benefit or 
beautify the town In which it has pleased God to 
place his investments in hostelry and real estate. 

Your Dutch driver is a cracker of whips, [ie 
cracks his whip at bis liorse to start liim or stop 
him ; he cracks his whip to warn the pedestrian out 
of the way ; ho cracks his whip to announce his ar- 
rival at the bote! <\<»>\- ; he cracks his whip to chaff 
the po'dv nurse at the baby carriage ; ho cracks his 
whip to keep lime to his <>wu musings. Ele never 
speaks to bis horse or bis fare, the crack of bis whip 
is the only language that he seems to speak. The 
oddity to match this in the Saratoga driver is his 
"wo-back." He is the only driver in the world 

who tells his horse lo |»;ie,l< when he wishes him 

simply to stop. 

As Saratoga has its ( Jitizens' ( Jorps and < inn ( !iub, 
so Carlsbad lias its shooting corps Royal Shooting 
Corps. Where royalty reigns everything is lt royal." 
I suggested to an bumble tradesman in London 
whether it would not be of advantage to him to 
float the banner over bis wares of " l Peanut Vender 
to Her Majesty the Queen 1" He was as much 
offended as Her Majesty might have been by the 
insinuation. 

The Royal Shooting Corps bf Carlsbad is not 



STRAY WAFERS. 65 

simply a jolly company in holiday regalia. They 
not only fire at a mark, but compel the disorderly 
to toe the mark. They are a tony police or town 
guard, and are very satisfactory to those who like 
to have a touch of the picturesque in the plumage 
of the male as well as the female of our species. 
They keep step in grain and gold to the delightful 
refrains that never fail to come from the German 
hands, however unpretentious or ill-paid. 

Visitors, noble, ignoble, and American, are al- 
lowed to participate in these shooting matches, and 
sometimes the country bumpkin hits the mark, 
while the scion of a lordly strain must be content 
with hitting only the target. 

Of those who have an aim in life many hit the 
target, few hit the mark, while a greater number 
than that of either of these must, owing to some- 
thing left out of their composition, live and die an 
aimless life. 

On my second morning at the Sprudel I fell in 
with a venerable polyglot, who startled me with 
the notion that soon took possession of me, that 
this was Paracelsus, who was still travelling over 
tin's country in search of the elixir that should bless 
the jaded human anthropoid with a new digestive 
apparatus and a new infusion of venous and arterial 
blood. 

lie was the beau-ideal of a philosopher, a doctor, 
and a crank. He was thin, and his eye, deep- 



66 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

sunken in his head, shot coruscations out from 
under a jutting pair of bushy eyebrows. His 
countenance was sicklied o'er with the pale cast of 
thought. He had the bearing of a recluse and the 
gait of a man who had used the same legs for at 
least seventy-five years. He spoke several lan- 
guages, and none better than that of Shakespeare 
and myself. He was easily beguiled into conversa- 
tion, and was very blithe and chatty when he found 
I was an American, pure and simple, and without 
admixture. 

Was I sure I had no German or other foreign 
strain in my veins ? 

" Yes," I replied, " unless, of course, you force 
me back a couple of centuries." 

' ; Ah ! that is fair enough," he said ; "a couple 
of centuries brings you back to where we now stand. 
We were all European brigands once, you know, 
flying at each other's throats upon the slightest prov- 
ocation." 

" Very much as we do now ?" 

" True, very much as we do now, only now we 
do our work of destroying one another with a more 
refined sense of malignant satisfaction. We open 
the battle with prayer, read out of the Gospel of 
peace and good- will, and close with the benediction. 
In fact," continued Paracelsus, warming as he con- 
tinued, " the fact now so generally received, that man 
is a part of nature, is getting itself illustrated anew 
with every revolution of the earth around the sun. 



STRAY WAFERS. 67 

He is in involuntary sympathy with the forces that 
shake the planet and howl over its surface, carry- 
ing all before them with cyclones of wind or cata- 
racts of water. These multitudes of people who 
gather here are a painful illustration of the fact. 
The human race is growing more and more nervous 
and volcanic, and convulsions and eruptions of hu- 
manity are sure to multiply in consequence. You 
.see by what is going on in your country that the 
form of government or the structure of society has 
little to do with it. Republicanism is but a cobweb 
thrown over the crater. The very light that civil- 
ization is pouring upon the human mind only aggra- 
vates its restlessness by increasing its sensitiveness 
to its obstacles. Educate the ignoramus, and the 
knowledge he obtains will be dynamite to both him 
and his educator. His new light reveals his own 
strength and the weakness of his adversary, his ad- 
versary being any one who represents his oppressors 
of the past. His oppressors of the past are the 
crowned villains who loaded their guns with the 
hearts of his ancestors, and the nobles and gentry 
who accumulated lands and palaces by leaving his 
ancestors exposed to the elements and the wild 
beasts." 

I charged Paracelsus with being a Republican, 
and slightly Red at that. 

" No, no," he said; "not a Republican, not a 
Monarchist, nothing but a Pessimist, a victim myself 
of the new flood of light that has come over the 






68 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

world. I, like the wretched revolutionists I am 
talking about, know too much. Too much knowl- 
edge is a dangerous thing. It makes the slave fight 
for freedom and the free laborer fight for more 
freedom. It is unfair. It does not fall equally 
upon the just and the unjust, the simple and the 
cunning. It plays into the hands of unjust wisdom 
and cripples the energies of honest incapacity." 

At this point the arrival of the carriage that I had 
ordered for a drive with some friends brought our 
conversation to an end, and we parted, Paracel- 
sus and I, with a hearty shake of the hands, and 
expressing the hope that we should at some future 
time resume the thread of our discussion. 

After my zwieback and a mud bath one Sunday 
morning I strolled into the Church of St. Mag- 
dalen. It has looked down from its niche on the 
hill- side upon many of the convulsions that have 
shaken Bohemia and rent Europe. It has been 
standing here since 1419, at least. It is an odd bit 
of architecture, and contains colossal evangelists in 
stone. Where is there a church of this ancient 
creed that does not move the sensibilities ? I have 
been in all the great cathedrals and at many of the 
unpretending shrines, where the candles burned 
and the poor knelt. Their very silence is impres- 
sive, and when the music comes it is always en- 
trancing, as it was at St. Magdalen, that overlooks 
the hurrying Tepel and the boiling Sprudel. The 



STRAY WAFERS. 69 

services were performed by the deacons of the Red 
Cross, who were organized in the time of the cru- 
sades for the care of the sick and wounded. There 
was a full hand, a wonderful soprano, a powerful 
baritone, and an organ of enormous power. The 
effect was alternately rousing and Bubduing. They 
Bang the Fidestes Adeles, thai ravishing bit of ap- 
pealing pathos, in the minor key, which lingers for- 
ever in the memory after it is once heard. 

It is mortifying to the gastronomic vanity of the 
rich invalid to find himself obliged to resort to the 
diet of the poor, in order to share their health. 
This shows bow the whirligig of time brings round 
its revenges. Luxury is dyspeptic. Poverty di- 
gests its food, and sleeps till morning. The work- 
ing people of Europe, but for whom the nobles of 
Europe would starve, live on the gastronomical 
round prescribed for the victims of inordinate 
wealth. 

Cobden attributed French prosperity to the soup 
of the French peasant. 

We may as well call Austria Germany, for the 

people are the same in customs and vernacular, and 
would be the same in political fraternity but for 
their rulers and owners, who order them to shoulder 
the hod or the musket, in accordance with the in- 
trigues and whims of their reigning families. Well, 
the reigning family of the United States of 



70 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

America, fifty million strong, has its whims and in 
trigues, too, and with disastrous consequences. 

In one peculiarity the Teuton is the same the 
world over. In Austria, as in Prussia, you see the 
original of the thrift that in America has made the 
solitary prairie blossom with towns and farms. If 
here, in the midst of plenty, they cultivate their 
fence corners, there their little children may be seen 
gleaning' after the grain wagon in the held. They 
pick up every stalk and spear. Nothing goes to 
waste. Even the young idea of the nobility is 
taught to shoot. The royal children learn a trade. 

" The Sprudel Book" was abolished in 1791. In 
that all visitors put their names, and opposite to 
them their voluntary contributions, which they felt 
compelled to make for music and the water. Now 
you have your name and voluntary contribution put 
down for you. If you do not remain over eight 
days you may depart without further taxation than 
that visited upon you by your landlady and her 
regiment of cormorants, who exact a florin for 
every bow and smile. If your stay is nine days you 
will be waited on for cur-tax and music-tax. 

The amount depends upon your "size" in the 
estimation of the tax-estimator. Here is where 
keeping up appearances by those who cannot afford 
to does not pay. In New York it does, perhaps in 
Saratoga it does, but at Carlsbad it does not. You 
are classified for the tax by the number of your 



STRAY WAFERS. ?'l 

servants and apartments. If they are suspiciously 
superfluous you will be classed with American 
financiers, who have come by way of Canada, and 
knighted brewers from the British Isles, and taxed 
about five dollars. If you are _one of the bonanza 
gods, denying himself the coupons which his heirs 
will share with their lawyer, you will be let off with 
about two dollars and a half , by taking a back room 
on the fourth floor. 

Your music will cost you from one to two dollars, 
according to your appreciation of Wagner and 
Beethoven, determined by your changes of raiment 
and the number of your wife's diamonds. 

You may call a roll of great names from the 
pages of the Sprndel Book. You may read the 
name of the first and only Iron Duke of Welling- 
ton while the present possessor of the title is passing 
under the window. You may study here the auto- 
graphs of kings, written by their grooms of the bed- 
chamber, and the veritable chirography of king- 
makers and music teachers, of Metternich, Beetho- 
ven and Bismarck, Schopenhauer and Bach, Auer- 
bach and Paganini, Tourgenieff and Eugenia, Peter 
the Great and Goethe the Great. 

Every boarding-house that lodged the Czar or 
the poet is carefully and conspicuously inscribed 
with his name and the date on which he was obliged 
to try the other houses 1 beds. 

Goethe the Great took his last drink of the 
Sprndel for his sins in 1823. lie was seventy-four, 



72 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

and the lass that he fell in love with on this occa- 
sion was only seventeen. She was one of the few 
of his flames who jilted him, but compromised on a 
wreath of flowers for his bust when it was unveiled 
in Carlsbad in 1883. 

Marshal Blucher came after the battle of Water- 
loo. He said " he had been the enemy of water 
all his life, and now the devil had sent him where 
he could get nothing else." 

All the crowned heads have been here and heads 
that have lost their crowns, and people who have 
lost 'their heads and have come here to find them, 
and society queens who have run down and have 
come here to be wound up. 

The room I had at the Westminster, the landlady 
took great pains to inform me, was Eugenia's when 
she was here last trying to mend her broken heart 
with the waters of the Sprudel. 

I saw her on the throne in all her stateliness and 
grace. When I saw her last she was preparing for 
the flight which I have described in " Shut Up in 
Paris." She was pale and sad then. She is paler 
and sadder now. 

From the Prince of Peace clown they all have 
their vinegar to drink. 

It was maintained at a meeting of the Restless 
Club at Carlsbad that the ill do more of the 
world's best work than the well ; that the ill live 
longer than the well, and that there are more eo- 



STRAY WAFERS. 73 

pie in Paradise to-day who have reached there 
through illness, and fatal illness at that, than there 
are of those exasperating fiends who were forever 
hoasting while upon earth that they " were never 
sick a day in their lives, and hadn't an unsound 
tooth in their head." lam reminded of the old 
lady who said she noticed that if she lived through 
the month of March she lived the whole year. She 
came to a March at last that she could not pass. 

These cheerful and inviting propositions were 
supported by an overwhelming array of biographical 
facts, which were not allowed to be met with coun- 
ter facts or in any way disputed. 

The greatest humorists and comedians are accord- 
ingly, as a rule, confirmed hypochondriacs. Theo- 
dore Hook complained of constant depression ; Sain- 
villc brought down the house with grimaces that 
came of the rheumatism, which, in turn, stimulated 
his wit ; the twinges of the gout that made Vernet 
groan made his audience laugh ; Basuege blew out 
the brains that kept the crowded theatre in a roar ; 
the rollicking rhyme of " John Gilpin" was written 
in one of poor Cowper's w r orst fits of the blues ; 
Douglas Jerrold coined his funniest drolleries in a 
dark room, while his eyes throbbed with agony ; 
Moliere's comedies were written under a dense 
cloud of despondency ; the witty Samuel Foote, and 
Monrose, and Potier, and Tousez all died in de- 
spair ; "Rousseau's fascinating sentimentalisms were 
the exhalations of his ^loom : Robert Hall's flights 



74 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

of eloquence were arrows shot from the pain in his 
spine ; Heine's exquisite irony, and Swift's sting- 
ing satire, and Carlyle's javelins of invective, and 
De Quincey's beautiful dreams, and George Eliot's 
marvellous analysis, and Pope's incomparable 
rhyme, and Scott's " Bride of Lammermoor," and 
Dr. Johnson's axioms, and Mrs. Browning's poetry, 
and Miss Bronte's stories, and Green's history, and 
Clifford's mathematics never saw the light without 
travail, and torture, and self-crucifixion. Eloquence 
and wit, rhetoric and logic, and the phraseological 
philosophy of the Concord School of Philosophy 
are all the more attractive and palatable for coining 
of a morbidity which quickens the action of the in- 
tellect and increases the power of rhetorical expres- 
sion. Borne complained of his recovery, and said 
the doctor "had cured him to health and stupid- 
ity. " He was well, but he was a fool. When he 
was ill he was witty. 

As walking about is a part of the Carlsbad Treat- 
ment — a movement cure of nature's own providing 
— the opportunity for carrying out this part of the 
Treatment is abundant. Nature and art combine to 
make the place attractive to the legs and eyes of 
the invalid vertebrata. 

The environs are enrapturing. You oh-oh at 
every step, for at every step of the easy incline a 
new and larger view bursts upon you. The dark 
green of the evergreen forests ; the sunlight burst- 



STRAY WAFERS. 75 

ing out from under the surly rain-cloud ; the wind- 
ing valleys to right and left, with here and there a 
glimpse of glittering water ; queer little Carlsbad 
nestling far below ; the snatches of music "floating 
up from cafe or park ; the approaching and receding 
mountain-chains ; the endless wilderness of tall and 
graceful pine, interspersed with linden, chestnut, 
birch, and mountain ash ; the carpet of leaf and 
moss, of bluebells and buttercups, under your feet ; 
the marvellous sky effects and cloud effects ; the 
farms and their crops of barley, oats, and vege- 
tables ; "the orchard, the meadow, and the deep- 
tangled wildwood, and all the loved scenes" which 
were known to the infancy of our race — why, one 
could ramble about Carlsbad daily for the three 
hundred and sixty-five days of the year, and then 
begin all over again, and find the first walk as new 
and charming as when we took it for the first 
time. 

One of these strolls is over the broad and shady 
gravel walk by the hill-side and the river-side. It 
is called "the four-o'clock promenade." It is 
lined with a double row of mammoth lindens, and 
overhung with majestic hills, now tipped with sun- 
light and now sombre with the shadow of the pass- 
ing clouds. The long line of booths under the trees 
are covered with all manner of pretty things for 
sale, contrived by the cunning fingers of the indus- 
trious Bohemians. The music will draw you to the 
cafe, where you never fail to be pleased with the 



76 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

sobriety and contentment of the German at his 
pleasures. 

Here you may sit at all hours, from the small 
hours of the morning to the end of the long twilight, 
and watch the hurrying stream of the river or the 
leisurely current of human life. 

In Carlsbad you do not need to walk yourself 
weary before you reach the spot where your walk 
begins. You have only to get out of bed. You do 
not need to go out at the door. You may step out 
of tne window upon the green slope, and begin the 
ascent in the bracing Bohemian morning. 

The highest hill that overlooks Carlsbad is Ewige 
Leben, eternal life. It is two thousand feet above 
the sea. I rambled all over it again and again, 
and every time was better pleased than at any time 
before. It is an exhilarating and fascinating stroll. 

The law is that every tree cut down shall be sup- 
planted by another, and that excellent statute is 
rigidly enforced, as you can see in your rambles 
through the forests that cover these glorious hills. 
The wood is very valuable, and while they are saw- 
ing the old log a new one is growing in its place. 
The tree is His, and He made it, and it ought to 
be treated with a reverence commensurate with its 
use and beauty. 

Time was in the Pyrenees when injury to trees 



STRAY WAFERS. 77 

was murder in the first degree, and there was the 
same punishment for the man who cut down a tree 
without authority as for the man who cat down 
his fellow-man. 

The Continental manners are military. Attitudes 
and hat-itudes come of the land being a camp, 
society an aristocracy, government a monarchy, and 
the throne the seat of social as well as martial 
power. Manners are handed down from the royal 
family, and handed round to every family. 

The Germans — in fact, all the Continentals, lift 
the hat to man as well as woman. Nor is there much 
discrimination in hat-lifting. Francis Josef could 
hardly he greeted with a barer head than that which 
greeted me an hour after I had been introduced to 
it. The porter rises, uncovers, and drops his eye 
upon your purse ; the chambermaid courtesies low 
at the shrine of American gratuities. 

I think we manage the hat with a more discrim- 
inating courtesy. We take it off to gray hairs, the 
President of the United States, and the ladies. 
Gentlemen touch it to one another, while nothing 
can be more touching to a gentleman than the nod 
of the plumes of a lady's bonnet. An Englishman 
wears his hat in bed. 

There is something quite neighborly and gratify- 
ing in the custom of the Continental in recognizing 
your existence as he leaves the car or the table at 



78 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

the restaurant. He may not have spoken to you 
throughout the whole day's journey, but when he 
rises to leave the compartment he lifts his hat, and 
says adieu. That is to say, Good -by, old fellow. 
You and I are travelling on the same balloon in 
space, and will presently join one another in col- 
lapsing into the balloon. Bon voyage and a peace- 
ful conclusion to it ! 

Yes, manners are taffy, and taffy tells. The 
salesman's suavity (until he finds you do not intend 
to buy), the waiter's series of infinitesimal atten- 
tions, the smiling deference of the hotel clerk, your 
little French teacher's commendation of your accent 
— manners are taffy, and taffy tells. 

Let us not underestimate manners. It is said sneer- 
ingly that they are superficial. So are all our social 
relations, fortunately for our peace of mind and the 
peace of society, and nothing is unimportant that 
keeps those relations in good repair. But " the 
polite are not sincere. ' ' Yes they are. Politeness is 
itself a form of sincerity. You may be as sincere 
with superficial etiquette as profound convictions, 
and are likely to be a far more agreeable neighbor 
with the former than the latter. The reason why 
Skimpole succeeds where honest Mr. Porcupine 
fails is because people prefer good-natured imposi- 
tion to the highest integrity, if it is clothed in 
quills. 



STRAY WAFERS. 79 

Manners oil the social machinery. The brusque 
break against them. We must yield or be thrown. 
Custom will not. 

Teach your children the few plain and simple 
courtesies of society. You may be unable to prevent 
their being porcupines, as that may be a matter of 
heredity, hut you may teach them how to keep 
down their quills, even if they do run in the family. 

The male Bohemians are as cruel to their women 
as they are polite to one another. They uncover, 
and bow, and bend low under their heavy sense of 
urbane consideration, while their women bend lower 
under their burden of wood or coal. In common 
with the American Indian and the African Zulu, 
the men smoke while the women work. Women 
sow and reap, women plough and drag the plough. 
The milk-cart and slop-wagon are drawn by women 
and dogs, and the driver, Hans Boheme, is kinder 
to his canine on the off side than to his deceased 
wife's sister on the near side. He is fond of birds, 
cats, and pups, and even boy babies, but is harsh 
to the female beast of burden of his own species, 
and wishes he were a Hindoo, that he might throw 
his female young into the Tepel. 

Etiquette is no more evidence of justice than 
public worship is of private morals. Politeness in 
society is a form like genuflexion in church. I in- 
sist that it is indispensable, but so far from proving 



80 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

character, it may be intended to conceal the want of 
character. Urbanity and cruelty are often found 
together, and live together amicably. Here is 
where Saratoga excels Carlsbad, with all its manners 
and its hills, and here is where the stars on our flag 
differ from all others on all other flags — they shine 
upon a nation illustrious for man's reverence for 
woman ! 




THE POET SCHILLEE AT CARLSBAD. 



ALL THE CURES. 

As the Mineral-AYater Cure lias its full share of 
space in this volume, we will omit it from this in- 
ventory, and begin with the Treatment which prob- 
ably antedates it — plain water, as it falls out of the 
clouds or springs out of the earth. 

The Water Cuke. — Water as a remedy, as a 
soother, or al layer, or alleviator, is as old as water 
and man. Water for wounds, water for ills, water 
in the shape of a wet sheet for rheumatism, or a 
wet cap for a hot head, or a bucketf ul for a pair of 
fighting dogs. But snuff is better for the dogs. 
Water cold, water warm, water piping hot -man, 
whether out of repair or in full possession of all his 
faculties, has no better remedial resource than 
water. Common water taken every quarter of an 
hour, a gobletful at a time, was long ago recom- 
mended for gout. Fire-water is never recom- 
mended for gout. 

Besides, as we have shown elsewhere, all water is 
more or less impregnated with minerals. At all 
events, it is always wet, and cool, if you prefer it 
so, or you may have it wet and warm, if that will 
suit you better. It will cleanse also, and the cleaner 



82 SAKATOGA CHIPS. 

you keep, the pleasanter you will be as a connubial 
companion. Cleanliness is next to godliness, there- 
fore with some it is next to nothing. 

Common water is food and mineral water is 
medicine, and food, we are told by the learned 
faculty, is obliged to obey the laws of the human 
organization, while medicine compels the organiza- 
tion to obey the laws of the remedy. A curious 
understanding, I must say, but it cannot be avoided 
if it cannot be disproved. 

The Water Cure, or hydropathy, includes and 
mak|s much of baths — so much of them, indeed, 
and the whole world of Cur-guests make so much 
of them, that they are entitled to a chapter of their 
own, and will receive it in this volume. 

The Hot- Water Cure. — This is a glass of hot 
water, taken a half hour before breakfast every 
morning of the seven days of the week, of the 
fifty-two weeks of the year, for the three score 
years and ten. The American citizen of bilious 
descent, who knows a good thing when he feels it,- 
will find this of inestimable service, but it will be 
of no use to the fast eater, or the pickle eater, or 
the man with the tears of whiskey in his eyes. For 
these there is no forgiveness. 

One of my mineral- water authorities tells me 
that " the virtues of the Baden-Baden waters are 
reduced to those of simple hot water." Doubtless 
with many a disordered imagination at Carlsbad or 
Saratoga the water from the pump heated would 



ALL THE CUKES. 83 

have the desired effect, if it could only be drawn 
from an alleged mineral spring. 

The Mug wort Cure. — This, so far as I am in- 
formed, is exclusively a Japanese remedy. It com- 
bines the heat cure, the water cure, and the herb 
cure, or juice, caloric, and vegetable matter. The 
leaves of the mug wort are placed upon the shoulder- 
blade and set on fire, and the blister thus created 
cures asthma. Those who are restored by the Mug- 
wort Cure are known as Mugwumps. 

The Diet Cure. — If you are a dyspeptic, as you 
are pretty sure to be if you are a citizen by birth 
of the United States, or if your liver is out of 
order, as it is tolerably likely to be if you have spent 
much of your life out of the frigid zone, I would 
advise you to eat, drink, and be merry in accordance 
with the dietary menu of the Carlsbad Treatment 
for five years of three hundred and sixty -live days 
each. (See chapter on the Carlsbad Treatment.) 

The Inhalation Cure. — You inhale your remedy 
instead of swallowing it or wallowing in it, whether 
it be vapor, electricity, gas, spray, mineralized air, 
or sea air. The famous Galen recommended the 
sulphurous air of Sicily. The base of Vesuvius 
during an eruption would be very effective. Some 
physicians hang branches of pine and some seaweed 
about the room of their consumptive patient. The 
inhalation Treatment may be carried on by the 
patient himself after he is once shown what he is to 
do and how he is to do it. 



84 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

The Massage or Shampoo Cure. — This is an old 
device, which the Occident owes to the Orient, and 
both to accident, for it is altogether probable that 
it grew ont of the custom of squeezing the water 
out of the drowning fellow-creature who overdid 
the Water Cure while in a state of empty pockets 
or unrequited affection. It consists of kneading 
the abdomen and punching the joints, and the 
quacks who have abused it ought to have their 
heads punched for their mercenary ignorance. It 
is generally accompanied by baths. 

Massage is an Arabic word, and means to press 
softly, and is not to be confounded with mashage. 
It was fashionable with the Chinese and Indians (of 
India) centuries before our era of ills and pills, and 
is now fashionable with the decollete society of the 
Feejee and the Sandwich Islands. They lie down 
flat on their backs, and the children walk over 
them. 

As massage or shampooing owes its efficacy to 
animal magnetism, its efficacy must depend upon 
the amount of animal magnetism which the sham- 
pooer is able to impart. This accounts for the fail- 
ure of some and the success of others who practice 
this Treatment, whether in the pulpit or at the 
barber's chair. 

In all hydropathics much is made of the friction 
produced by rubbing after the bath. It is stimu- 
lative. But there is always danger of dulness 
coming on as the effect of the rubbing passes off. 



ALL THE CURES. 85 

In that case fleas may be used. We are told that 
pet dogs grow dull from too much washing and 
combing. They miss the stimulus of fleas. 

The Milk Cure. — There are several kinds of 
milk besides that of New York City — cow's milk, 
goat's milk, sheep's milk, mare's milk, donkey's 
milk, and the milkman's milk. With the excep- 
tion of the milkman's milk that of the donkey con- 
tains the most water. Sheep's milk is the most 
used in the Milk Cure of Europe. It is the most 
nutritious. The Russian doctors use mare's milk, 
and consider it the richest milk known. It makes 
the richest butter. 

I saw a milkman's sign from the top of a London 
omnibus the other day, which ran thus, " Royal 
Short- Horn Dairy ;" and this was under it, " The 
public are invited into the cow-house to see the 
milk drawn from the cow for the jugs at four 
pence !" There seems to be as much scepticism 
about the purity of milk as there is concerning the 
existence of people like ourselves in the planet 
Mars. 

You are sure of pure milk for your Milk Cure at 
Saratoga, for if the cream does not rise on it the 
author of it is carried down to the beautiful Sara- 
toga Lake, and is seen no more. 

The tribes on the Russian and Siberian Steppes 
have long used mare's milk as a remedy for and 
preventive of consumption, and now and then the 
milk of human kindness is found to be a capital 



86 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

remedy for the complaints of labor. It is seldom 
tried, however, but it will be when the Golden Rule 
becomes the rule of life. 

Kefyr is another milk preparation produced by 
fermentation, and is sometimes called effervescent 
milk wine. It is aimed at stomachic disorders, and 
is said to nourish where all other food and drink 
fails. 

Whey, or milk minus its caseine, is taken for 
scrofula and disorders of the kidneys. 

The Milk Cure is prescribed for dyspepsia, dropsy, 
and articular rheumatism, or rheumatism that com- 
pels you to articulate your opinion of it. 

Buttermilk is recommended for plethora abdom- 
inalis, and koumiss, or fermented mares' milk — 
the milk, not the mare, being fermented — is con- 
sidered good for intestinal catarrh and, in the case 
of a politician, for inflammation of the JE Phiribus 
Unuvi. 

Milk was a common drink in Homer's day. He 
probably wrote better poetry under its inspiration 
than some more recent poets write under the influ- 
ence of the juice of rye straw. The mighty bard 
of Greece spread his wings toward the sun with 
nothing to sustain his flight, except the milk of the 
mountain goat. He was " nursed in the milk of a 
better time." 

In sentimental Italy the milkman has a water- 
skin up his arm, which he surreptitiously squeezes 
into your cup of pure milk. 



ALL THE CURES. 87 

There is or was once a lot of our fellow-crea- 
tures on the Caspian Sea called Massagetse. Their 
name would insinuate that they practice massage. 
At all events, they are devoted to the Milk Cure 
and the survival of the youngest, for they eat their 
grandmothers. 

The Grape Cure. — The quantity of grapes you 
are to consume varies from five to twenty-five 
pounds a day of this delicious medicine. Grapes 
stimulate secretion, although nut economy, because 
while the sugar absorbed operates beneficially upon 
the kidneys, it operates financially upon the physi- 
cian who prescribes it. 

The Fruit Cure. — If grapes fail there are other 
fruits of bush and tree, such as strawberries, 
cherries, currants, and peaches, which have the 
same effect upon the imagination, if not upon the 
gastric juices. 

The Peach and Cream Cure might be tried by 
the exercise of a little fortitude. It is common in 
Delaware and New Jersey. 

The Herb Cure. — The herbs of the herb doctors 
cure everybody of everything. The medicine man 
of the red Americans will tell you all about it, and 
several herb doctors there are of our own race of 
credulous Americans who will demonstrate to you 
that whatever be your malady their decoction of 
juices will restore you. 

The Herb Cure will cure you of descending to 
the swine, if you have descended from the gods. 



88 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

The followers of Odysseus were inflicted with a mal- 
ady of the imagination called insania zoanthropica, 
which transformed them into pigs. Odysseus him- 
self escaped the disease by eating an herb prescribed 
by Dr. Hermes, called moly, and to this day the 
herb apothecaries have been searching in vain for 
moly. If they could only find a remedy for the 
Americans who have " eaten of the insane root that 
takes the reason prisoner" — the root of all evils ! 

A sorrow-soothing herb was given to Helen by 
the Egyptian Polydamne, and she prescribed it to 
Telenviclms for his melancholy over the memory 
of Ulysses. Homer tells us that to Agamde, 
" each healing herb was known that springs from 
the great earth.' 5 The Herb Cure disputes an- 
tiquity with the Mineral- Water Cure. 

The Raw- Meat Cure. — Raw ham, raw game, 
raw beef, are to be found among the innumerable 
remedies that flesh is heir to. As the meat must be 
chewed to be efficacious, it would be a failure in 
this country. As soon as mastication sets in, it 
would be well enough to try the Raw-Meat Cure. 
When mastication comes dyspepsia goes, and half 
the cures will go with it. 

The Swedish-Movement Cure. — You are shaken 
up by machinery, as you deserve to be, if you will 
not shake yourself up early in the morning and 
shake your legs in a daily perambulation of ten 
miles. It is good for hot-headed people who have 
cold feet. It corrects irregular circulation, and will 



ALL THE CURES. 89 

postpone, if not altogether prevent, paralysis. 
People who cannot work up will enough or sense 
enough to walk may be induced to get into the 
movement-cure machine, at the rate of two dollars 
an hour. 

The Electricity Cure. — Never fail to pay your 
nickel and seize the handles of the machine of the 
itinerant electrifier. Headache, and toothache, and 
aches of the joints, and even the aching heart of 
misplaced attachment may be appeased by the Elec- 
tricity Cure. 

The Liver-Pad Cure. — An eminent physician 
was asked if he thought the liver-pad does any 
good. 

" Do you think it does ?" 

"Yes." 

" Well, then it does !" 

The liver-pad is borrowed from the malarious 
Italians. They applied plasters of frankincense to 
the pit of the stomach to regulate the secretions of 
bile. It is as old in this country as turpentine for 
rheumatism or camphor for headache. 

Many a grandmother of ours has enclosed frank- 
incense in a bag, and hung it on her person, as a 
buffer against malaria. It is no remedy, however, 
for sewer-gas or plumbers. 

" Do you think.it does you any good ?" 

"No." 

"Then it don't !" 

The Short- Vacation Cure. — This is the ounce 



90 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

of prevention. It is designed to make a cure un- 
necessary. It is a hop-up and run off, without even 
so much as a half hour's notice or a change of 
linen. When you feel your head simmering, your 
wits scattering, and your temper snapping your 
wife's head off, tell your employer that you will go 
mad unless you go to Saratoga. If you are your 
own employer, you are probably, as the Scotch say, 
" not altogether there," and nothing will bring 
you there altogether like a sudden flight to Saratoga 
and a slide down on a toboggan, if it is winter, or 
a lay off on the hotel piazzas, if it is summer, and 
a good swig of mineral water, whether it is winter 
or summer. Waiting for the regulation vacation to 
come round is itself wearying and worrying. The 
system gets by the point where recuperation is pos- 
sible, and never gets back again to it. The break 
that could be repaired by a brief rest becomes so 
chronic from neglect that a long vacation loses its 
effect. 

The Faith Cure. — Only believe that you will bo 
cured by believing that you will be cured, and you 
certainly will be cured of whatever can be cured by 
believing that it has been cured. 

The Mind Cure. — Make up your mind that you 
will be cured by making up your mind that you 
will be cured, and you certainly will be cured of 
whatever you can be cured of by making up your 
mind that you have been cured of it. 

Stop your mind from thinking of your body. 



ALL THE CURES. 91 

Take your tongue by the throat and strangle it 
every time it says one word about your ills, aches, 
pains, or misfortunes. That's the Mind Cure. 

Stop thinking while you are eating. If you 
think during your meal of your business or profes- 
sion, of your pending bargain or the article you are 
writing, you will eat as rapidly as you think, and 
your food will go down in lumps, and nervous 
dyspepsia will certainly ensue. The minstrel's 
jokes or Gilbert's comedies will help you chew your 
chops and relish your macaroni. 

The Compulsory-Rest ('ire. — This is gym mis- 
tical. It is of the nature of a silence cure by gag- 
ging, a stationary cure by a strait-jacket, a rest 
cure, in short, by an application of compulsion, 
which aggravates the restless disposition. Nothing 
makes a man want to get up like holding him down. 
The cheapest and quickest way to secure the bene- 
fits of the Compulsory-Rest Cure is to commit some 
crime that will insure you a cell in the penitentiary. 

The Rest Cure that is genuine, voluntary, and 
promotive of sleep, cheerfulness, and recuperation 
is best attained at Saratoga Springs. There nature 
has provided all the conditions necessary to secure 
and insure it — sunshine, ozone, breathing-room, and 
air worth breathing. It is only necessary that the 
Cur-guest shall put himself under the influence of 
these conditions. 

But do you know how to utilize or appropriate 
these conditions which nature has provided for you ( 



92 



SARATOGA CHIPS. 



Do you know how to rest ? Rest is given and 
taken. Best is given to those who are qualified for 
taking it. The qualification is a rare one among 
the Americans of the great Republic. Well, it 
will not be the fault of Saratoga, with its walks and 
drives and hotel piazzas, its quiet nooks for quiet 
souls, its diverting panorama at the Springs — it will 
not be the fault of Saratoga if it does not give you 
rest. It cannot give what w T ill not be taken. 




ALL THE BATHS. 

No Treatment or remedy is as old as the Water 
Treatment, and the older half of this treatment is 
bathing. Next to breathing comes bathing. We 
are no sooner born than we are bathed, and the last 
act of good-fellowship is an act of ablution, if not 
absolution, and neither the one nor the other can 
be performed without water. Even an alderman is 
not admitted to the penitentiary without a bath. 

The bath-tub plays a conspicuous part in the 
architecture and hygienics of history. 

The ruins of the baths of Caracalla, in Rome, 
compare in magnificence and impressiveness with 
those of the Coliseum. They covered a space of 
one hundred and forty thousand square yards, and 
accommodated nearly two thousand bathers at the 
same time. Their walls were of marble, their col- 
umns of variegated granite, their floors of mosaic 
of the most costly and striking description. They 
were adorned with urns, statuary, fountains, flower 
gardens, and vineyards. 

Here Shelley wrote his " Prometheus Unbound," 
and describes the intoxication that he felt as he 
roamed among the winding labyrinths, flowery 
glades, blossoming thickets, and dizzy arches sus- 
pended in the air. 



94 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

Whoever lias seen St. George's Hall, Liverpool, 
lias seen an almost exact reproduction of only about 
one fourth of the baths of Caracalla, in Eorae. 
What must have been the aquatic grandeur and 
acoustic annoyances of the original ! Really now, 
come to think of it, a bath-tub is about the correct 
shape for an auditory, with the speaker on its bot- 
tom and at one end. 

If all the hotels of Saratoga Springs were consol- 
idated and reconstructed into a bathing establish- 
ment it would be a very small one in comparison with 
the- bathing facilities presented to their subjects by 
the classic emperors of the olden time. However, 
Saratoga enterprise should not seek to supplant 
but to supplement its hotels by a mammoth 
mineral-water sanitarium. That the capital thus 
invested would pay, Europe, Asia, and Carlsbad 
abundantly demonstrate. 

The baths of Diocletian covered about two hun- 
dred and ninety acres, and furnished separate accom- 
modations for thirty- two hundred bathers. Forty 
thousand men were employed in building them. 
The present ruins cover a space one mile in circum- 
ference. The Pantheon is supposed to have been 
the entrance to a bath-house. 

I was shown a hot sulphur spring in Italy where 
the Emperor Trajan used to bathe, and I find it 
described by Pliny, who was a guest of his majesty. 
Author and emperor have long since passed away, 
and the spring bubbles up as though nothing had 




BATHS OF CARACALLA. 



ALL THE BATHS. 97 

happened. " Men may come and men may go, but 
I go on forever." And the men may reign or 
write ; it makes no difference. 

The ruins of enormous and highly-decorated 
bath edifices have been excavated under the town 
of Bath. They were doubtless built by the Romans. 

Among: the treasures of the treasure house of 
King Artuxerxes bestowed upon the house of God 
were one hundred baths of wine, one hundred baths 
of oil and salt, " without prescribing too much/' 

The Order of the Bath derives its name from the 
ceremony of ablution in the initiation of a knight. 
It was, as in religious rites, designed as an emblem 
of purity, and indicates that some who have passed 
through it might be the better for passing through 
it again. 

The reason why the Romans went into a decline, 
where they remain to this day, is because they 
overdid the Hot- Water Cure. They divided their 
time between the battle-field and the bath-tub, in- 
stead of anticipating Christopher Columbus in dis- 
covering us Americans. 

Josephus tells us that Herod tried the warm 
water nt Callirhoe for some ailment. It is to be 
hoped it was the croup, and that he is not cured of 
it yet. 

Drinking mineral water came long after bathing 
in it. 

Until about 1550, two centuries or more after its 
discovery, Carlsbad was, as its name imports, given 



98 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

over exclusively to the Bath Cure. The Treatment 
was bathing exclusively. 

The legend is that the waters healed the wounds 
of both the Emperor Charles IY. and his dog, in 
1350. They were hunting, and the dog followed a 
deer over the precipice into the spring, and recov- 
ered so rapidly of its fractures that his imperial 
master tried the waters on the wound he had re- 
ceived at the battle of Crecy, and with such success 
that he called the town after himself and his bath — 
Charlesbath. But Wary, or Warmbath, it seems, 
was the name of it long before it was named by 
the wounded monarch. 

From about 1350 to about 1550 the Emperor 
Charles IY. sat upon a seat hewn out of the solid 
rock, with his royal gout in the Sprndel, before it 
occurred to him or his medical adviser that the 
water might be as beneficial when you put it on the 
inside of you as when yon put yourself on the out- 
side of it. 

That the Bath Cure may have been resorted to as 
an amusement by the visitors to Carlsbad of that 
day is implied by the tart remark of Dr. Payer : 
" Nature has created this bath for patients and not 
for anybody's lust or amusement." Bathing is a 
luxury when it is designed to be. It is making a 
climate out of water. How the hounds enjoy it, 
and the pigs, and the scions of an expensively fur- 
nished house ! 

" First take a bath" is the order of Ulysses in his 



ALL THE BATHS. 99 

preparations for the counterfeit wedding that was 
to ensnare the suitors to their fate. Ulysses is the 
most illustrious of the Knights of the Bath. He 
seems to have spent a considerable portion of his 
time in the salt water, and was, in consequence, 
enabled to be as decollete in his costume as the 
most fashionable of Washington society could exact. 

There were arrangements for taking a bath at the 
entrance of the residences of the Greek swells. 

I believe the Greeks still commemorate the mar- 
tyrdom of St. Patricias 'by pilgrimages to a hot 
spring called Kurkutlus, into which their saint was 
thrown for refusing sacrifices to the gods. When 
heathenism disappeared fire was substituted for 
water. 

There are hot springs at the pass of Thermopylae, 
and to this day their clouds of vapor rise as incense 
to the memory of Leonidas and his three hundred 
heroes, who might have won the fight if the water 
in which they bathed had been cold instead of hot. 
A cold bath for a hot contest. 

It is not likely that all the baths can be called by 
name, as they are perpetually multiplying, and 
those who have the multiplying of them are not in- 
nocent of the disposition to increase their number 
without altering their character. Remedies, like 
maladies, are in the hands of those who amuse them- 
selves and confound the lexicographers with inex- 
plicable additions to medical nomenclature. 

Some of the baths are : the common-water bath, 



100 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

the iron- water bath, the sulphur- water bath, the 
salt-water bath, the rain-water bath, the electro- 
magnetic bath, the compressed-air bath, the electro- 
chemical bath, the medicated bath, the gas bath, 
the smoke bath, the vapor bath, the sheet bath, the 
hot-air bath, the pine bath, the sand bath, the mud 
bath, the animal bath, the Turkish bath, the Irish 
bath, the Russian bath, the needle bath, the spray 
bath, the wave bath, the cataract bath, the douche 
bath, the shower bath, the swimming bath, the 
thermal or hot bath, the cold bath, the tepid bath, 
the vertical bath, the oblique bath, the ascending 
bath, and —going in to swim. 

For the Animal Bath the body is wrapped in the 
skin of an animal that has just been slaughtered, or 
the diseased part of the patient is put into the body 
or blood of the recently killed animal. 

If yon ask for a Smoke Bath you will be put up 
to your chin into what is called a fumigating box 
filled with vapor of sulphur or mercury. 

To secure a Chlorine Bath the body is enclosed 
up to the chin in a box filled with chlorine, which 
generates extreme heat, and is followed by a prickly 
eruption and profuse perspiration. 

The Gas Bath is administered through a hole in 
the box, which encloses your body and leaves out 
your head. The gas used is generally carbonic-acid 
gas. 

A stream of carbonic-acid gas is directed into the 
ear for the cure of deafness, and upon a sore leg or 



ALL THE BATHS. 101 

an enlarged liver, and may be tried without success 
upon a swelled head. 

The Turkish Bath, sometimes called the perspira- 
tion bath, is a basin bath in Turkey, to begin with, 
followed by a shampoo in a warm room, and then 
by a rubbing down in another room full of vapor, 
which starts the perspiration, and then by an old- 
fashioned wash of soap and water, and then by pipe 
and coffee and a doze on a lounge. 

The Sheet Bath was introduced by Priessnitz. 
We are wrapped in a wet sheet, wringing wet with 
cold water. This is repeated at intervals of an 
hour or so, alternated with a plunge bath, and rub- 
bing with a dry towel, and a, shower and a done/,, 
bath, always with cold water. Tin's treatment lias 
variations and modifications, and may be kept up 
all day long, with ample intermissions and three 
very frugal meals, "with plain water as the only bev- 
erage. 

There is no doubt of the efficacy of cold water, 
whether put on the body with sheet, or hand, or 
douche, for insomnia, cold feet, or hot head, or as 
a preventive against catching cold by exposure. It 
may be resorted to either before or after the ex- 
posure. 

For the throat, plain cold water dashed on with 
the hand and rubbed off with a coarse towel is a 
preventive of internal inflammation, as old as it is 
sure. In every case — for cold extremities, irregu- 
lar circulation, nervousness or irritability, or in- 



102 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

ability to sleep — throw on the water quickly, and as 
quickly rub it off. The consequent glow is one of 
the most refreshing of the innumerable sensations 
known to the only animal addicted to sensational 
friction or fiction. 

Cold water, like cold air, is invigorating ; warm 
water, like warm air, is debilitating. 

Never take a warm bath in the morning or just 
before going out. 

A cold bath in the morning and any time during 
the night, if you cannot sleep, but be very quick 
about it. 

You may save yourself from a hard cold or 
pneumonia and one of its premature consequences 
by a quick cold foot bath the moment you arrive at 
home with cold or wet feet. 

The Pennes Bath, which I name after the French- 
man who concocted it, is compounded of delphine, 
bromide of potassium, sulphate of alumina, sulphate 
of lime, sulphate of iron, sulphate of soda, phos- 
phate of soda, and aromatic oils. If you find your- 
self entirely alive after one of these baths, you may 
try another. 

The Mud, or Peat, or Moor Bath is, one would 
think, anything but a pretty circus, nevertheless it 
was put on exhibition when it was introduced, and 
the enterprising exhibitor made a prodigious sensa- 
tion and a great deal of money by its introduction 
to the scrofulous monarchs and gouty nobility of 
fifty years ago. The exhibitor would exhibit him- 



ALL THE BATHS. 103 

self for hours, buried to the beard in this poultice 
of mineralized and heated peat. One M.D. (mud 
"doctor) wore a pig-tail, which was platted and tied 
up like a horse's tail, while lie was taking his mud 
bath in public on the country road. 

The Indians have for ages been in the habit of 
rubbing themselves with the mud of the Ganges. 

My first experience in a mud bath occasioned me 
the loss of more self-respect than any other act of 
my life, except the taking of a mortgage on a West- 
ern farm ; but I can easily imagine how easily the 
imagination can be gratified by a treatment that ap- 
peals to it so strangely and strongly. No man with 
an aesthetic sense of the fitness of things would con- 
sent to sit in his own presence in a tub of black 
mud for three-quarters of an hour, without feeling 
that the degradation of his position was fully com- 
mensurate with the magnitude of his disorder. 

As the fundamental virtue of the moor or peat 
used consists in its being decayed vegetation, one 
would infer that the muck which is found in abun- 
dance near Saratoga Springs would, when charged 
with hot mineral water, answer every purpose of 
the hepatic and rheumatic, and it will. If a new 
name is necessary, let ours be called a Muck Bath 
of an expensive variety, and its success is guaran- 
teed. 

Frazenbad, which is noted for its mud baths, is 
in a peat bog, very like in color and consistency 
the muck swamps in the vicinity of Saratoga. 



104- SARATOGA CHIPS. 

These swamps would furnish material enough to 
keep thirteen hundred and seventeen bath-tubs in 
motion for thirteen hundred and seventeen years, 
and would cure one million three hundred and 
seventeen thousand four hundred and two Ameri- 
cans of their sour disposition, brought on by living 
in New York and sending ice-cream and pickles 
down the same alimentary canal. 

The baths at Schlangenbad are very popular with 
those who wish to iron out their wrinkles and 
whiten out their tan and freckles, and so put a bet- 
ter face on their matrimonial proposals. 

This cutaneous efficacy of the water illustrates the 
failure of analysis, to which I have devoted one of 
my chapters, for the man with the retort and caloric 
finds no reason for this effect in the constituents of 
the water, and abandons the conundrum in despair. 

But, then, as I contend elsewhere, we do not 
need to know the nature of what benefits us any 
more than we need to know what is the matter 
with us. 

The Neubad, at Carlsbad, was built in 1880, at a 
cost of about forty thousand dollars, and contains 
twenty-two mud baths and twenty-four mineral 
baths. The tubs for the first-class invalids are 
made of porcelain, those for invalids of the second 
class are made of w T ood. The porcelain is as sure 
to cure you of sciatica as a diamond earring is to 
cure your wife of wanting a coachman in livery for 
her daughter's husband. 



ALL THE BA.THS. 105 

The Europe of William and Francis Josef and 
Bismarck charges you ten cents for your towels and 
two cents for your soap. So that if you really get 
your bath per se, so to speak — that is, the water and 
the tub for twenty-five cents in Euroj)e, you can 
hardly come out of it clean and dry without paying 
forty cents. When the United States of America 
gives you a bath it furnishes the towels and the 
soap, as well as the water and the tub. Xor does 
it charge you for the air you breathe while you are 
taking your bath. 

At Royat, France, they make much of mineral- 
ized steam baths. The steam is applied to the 
rheumatic part by means of a hose, or it is sys- 
tematically inhaled by the gourmand from Paris or 
New York. 

The mineral water is also sprayed upon the pass- 
ages of nose or throat afflicted with catarrh. Some- 
times the stream is reduced to a knitting-needle, 
and this ought to be called the Knitting- Needle Bath. 
When the water is thrown on with a hose by one 
man, another man rubs it off with a towel that brings 
the skin off with it. That is very exhilarating. 

At Leuk we sit in the bath and knit in the bath ; 
we read in the bath and nap in the bath ; we back- 
bite in the bath and play cards in the bath, and, in 
short, are entirely too long in the bath. Overdone 
bathing has got so many in hot water that its hours 
have been numbered. Few places now tolerate the 
all-day wallow. 



106 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

Old wounds are cured by mineral- water baths, 
and are therefore strongly recommended to politi- 
cians whose feelings have been wounded by the 
cartoonists and lampoonists, and to susceptible 
young chaps who have been jilted. 

Fortunate is the workingman who has mineral 
mud to work in, especially if he has poison in his 
blood or if his bones are full of the sins of his 
youth. The man who was employed at Bourbon- 
Lancy, in 1807, to clear out the conduits, was cured 
of sores on his leg which had crippled him from his 
birth! The same service under the same circum- 
stances would have killed him on the spot if he 
had been a sound man. Siinilia similibus curantur ! 

There is generally a Complaint Book in the bath- 
houses, in which you record not the complaint for 
which you are undergoing the Treatment, but the 
criticisms you may have to make upon the obse- 
quious attendant, who may be doubtful of his tip. 

A physician from Scotland notes the tenderness 
and patience of the rubbers and shampooers. So 
did I, although I may not have been blind to the 
fact that the eye of the servant in Europe looketh 
unto the hand of the American. 

Bathing is to this day as much depended upon as 
drinking at all the mineral-water resorts of Europe 
and the East. 

The bath-tubs of Europe are as richly endowed 
as their wine cellars or their chairs of Sanscrit, 
while ours are as deficient in endowment as our 



ALL THE BATHS. 



ior 



chairs of Plain English. The ingenuity, archi- 
tecture, and capital bestowed upon this department 
at all European mineral-water resorts are very 
noticeable to Americans, who are accustomed to see 
this arm of the recruiting service hanging listlessly 
at the side or absent altogether. It is a very un- 
sagacious deficiency. 

Some of the most complete and luxuriant bath 
establishments in the world are at Carlsbad, Baden- 
Baden, Brnsa, Aix-les-Bains, and Cheltenham. 
Buxton, and Busliey, in England. 

At Buxton, England, the edifices erected for the 
baths and the conveniences furnished for the bathers 
are worth a voyage to see. Nothing nearer than 
the Orient can surpass them in luxuriance. Around 
them stretch in every direction one hundred acres 
of walks in the midst of the far-famed scenery of 
Derbyshire. 

There are in the Old World about two thousand 
mineral-water resorts, where bathing is made and 
provided for as a specialty. In some, in many of 
these places, especially those of the East, it is the 
main dependence for gathering visitors, Cur-guests, 
and income. The number of people, well and ill 
and idiopathic, who annually frequent these resorts, 
on purpose to avail themselves of their baths, are, at 
the lowest calculation, five hundred thousand. If 
these five hundred thousand Cur-guests were de- 
prived of their baths, they would seek and not find 
them in America !— in enterprising America ! 




A SHOWER BATH. 



ANALYTICAL DIFFICULTIES. 

TnE patient patient of the Mineral-Water Treat- 
ment should not be disheartened by the perplexities 
of the analysts or their differences of opinion. 

They are not averse to terrifying us with the re- 
sults of their investigations. They can inform us 
without a shudder, with even the twinkling eye of 
professional enthusiasm, that we drink enough 
arsenic in mineral water to kill us, if wo were to he 
killed in that way, and that a rabbit has been de- 
prived of its entire existence by no more theine than 
we take in our cup of tea, and no more caffeine than 
we take in our cup of coffee. Another analytical bug- 
aboo employed to alarm the unsuspecting laity is the 
fact that there are as many living creatures in one 
drop of water as there are human beings on the face 
of the earth — that is, about five hundred millions ! 
So that in a glass of pure, clear, delicious, and re- 
freshing water we imbibe about a million hundred 
millions members of the animal creation. 

Such is life ! It is sustained upon what will bring 
it to an end, if it has the opportunity. Bold Gam- 
betta was found after his death to be as largely im- 
pregnated with the chlorides and iodides as the rock 



110 



SARATOGA CHIPS. 



around the Sprudel. He died of his remedy. Any 
water may kill. A friend of mine died of drinking 
typhoid-fever in one glass of the purest-looking 
well water that ever slaked a burning thirst. How 
good it tasted, how bad it acted ! 

At this point my newspaper brings me the num- 
ber of living bacteria in the iced water drunk by 
New York, and gives as its authority a specialist 
in bacilli. Dr. T. Mitchell Prudden. Upon this 

authority we 
learn that with 
every glass of 
iced water the 
New Yorker 
swallows from 
fifty-nine thou- 
sand to three 
hundred and 
seventy thou- 
sand living bac- 
teria. The Cro- 
ton supplies 
about fifty-eight thousand in every half pint and 
the crystal ice of the Hudson River about three 
hundred and twenty-two thousand more. 

At some points of the picturesque Hudson, Dr. 
Prudden tells us, a half pint of pure water contains 
five hundred thousand bacteria ! Fourteen million 
cubic centimetres of sewage pour into the Hudson 
River every day ! In two towns there are seventy- 




RESIDENCE OF HON. GEORGE S. BATCHELLER. 



ANALYTICAL DIFFICULTIES. Ill 

five deaths a year from typhoid-fever, engendered 
by the universal beverage of their inhabitants — 
iced water ! 

Need we wonder that the learned specialist calls 
upon the State Board of Health for a rigorous in- 
spection of ice-making on the Hudson { Here is 
another argument against the iced water of the 
American of the United States, which is closing out 
as many insurance policies now as avarice or stoves 
in the railway cars. While the water may he 
wholesome, the ice may be fatal. 

Here, too, is another argument in favor of min- 
eral water, it needs no ice, its natural temperature 
is exactly right, except when it is better for the 
patient that it should be warm. 

The resident of Saratoga, who is indebted to its 
springs for his table water, as well as his remedial 
beverage, will miss his place of residence exceed- 
ingly when he goes away from home. Especially 
and emphatically will he miss the bubbling foun- 
tains when he suspects that his beverage contains 
fifty-eight thousand of his fellow-creatures, and the 
lump of ice in it designed to make it palatable con- 
tains by actual count three hundred and twenty-two 
thousand more ! So that ignorance of the constit- 
uents of our beverages is bliss to those who drink 
them, for if we find our suspicions verified in one 
instance, they will be aroused in every other, and 
the result will be that we shall perish of panic rather 
than gratify our thirst. 



112 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

Even if the constituents of the water could be 
made remedial by simply being committed to mem- 
ory, they would be out of our reach, for the reason 
that they are out of the reach of those who are in 
pursuit of them. If a knowledge of them is unat- 
tainable, how is it to be made available ? 

It is conceded by our analytical authorities that 
there are several constituents of mineral water which 
elude analysis, but which are quite as potential as 
any that they succeed in capturing and labelling. 
Dr. Glover, a high authority in mineral waters, 
says, * Chemical analyses do not give the exact con- 
stituents of the water as existing in it, they only 
give the bases and the acids. These are afterward 
combined, according to certain theoretical rules, as 
they are supposed to exist in the water." 

Again he says, " Chemistry does not in every 
instance give the exact constitution of a water," 
and quotes another authority as saying that " in 
analyzing waters we only dissect their carcasses." 

The temperature itself amounts to an ingredient, 
since water cannot heat or cool without causing a 
redistribution of its constituents and a release of 
some of them. Common air is another ingredient. 
So is carbonic-acid gas, "partly united" or alto- 
gether " free," and nitrons gas, together with alka- 
lies and acids, innumerable and intangible. Vege- 
table matter plays its subtle and elusive part in 
this curious and evasive compound. The ancient 
Romans found conferva in their waters, and used it 



ANALYTICAL DIFFICULTIES. 113 

for dressing their wounds. A plant called anabaine 
exists in the waters of Dax and Niris, and a sub- 
stance called siilfuraire in those of the Pyrenees, 
and another called oscillaria calli la in those of Vichy 
and Carlsbad. Another indefinable substance is 
({noted by the chemists of an ' ; organic veg -to-ani- 
mal " nature. Analysis revels in vocabulary, and 
hyphens as metaphysics in clouds of words. 

Perhaps no analysis of mineral water is to be com- 
pared in rhetorical efficacy with that of Mount Dorc, 
which is called phthisisicentibus medicabiles. 

Waters that defy the chemists to lin<l anything at 
all in them of any special consequence, whether 
beneficial or detrimental, hare pro luced the most 
extraordinary effects upon man and brute. 

Dr. Glover tells us that "chemistry has been 
able to make nothing of the waters of Gastein, and 
Bezeli us declared that it was almost distilled water/' 
Nevertheless, this colorless and flavorless fluid causes 
vomiting, and a bath in it results in " almost mir- 
aculous succor to the paralytic." Gentle horses and 
husbands immersed in it are rendered unmanageable 
and vicious. 

This is supposed to be the effect of electricity, 
which, while dodging the analyst, pounces upon the 
patient, reminding us of the Irishman who pursued 
the flying train, crying, " Stop ! stop ! You have 
a passenger aboard that you left behind." The 
chemist always has a passenger aboard that he has 
left behind or set " free." 



1L4 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

These may be called electrical as distinguished 
from mineral waters, as others may be called car- 
bonic-acid-gas waters as distinguished from both. 
The gas eludes and the electricity defies analysis, 
and yet remains so potent an ingredient of it as to 
paralyze the patient or restore the paralytic ! The 
most metaphysical work on metaphysics is the 
Materia Medica. 

Whatever may be our opinion of what is called 
" the electrical theory," to account for the efficacy 
of mineral water, there can be no doubt of the 
beneficent effect of the electricity it contains. 

Electric sparks are frequently seen during a bath 
in mineral water. Paralytic and rheumatic patients 
are recommended to take the bath during a thun- 
der-storm. Queen Anne of Denmark was scared 
out of her wits and out of the bath-tub at Bath by 
a flame which suddenly shot up at her side. Many 
a young lady has been transfixed by a similar ap- 
parition that shot up at her side in the drawing-room. 

In fact, no water is quite free from mineral 
substances or atmospheric elements. Rain-water, 
caught as it falls, contains nitric acid and ammonia, 
to say nothing of electricity and animalcula, which 
need only time to enable them to evolve into ana- 
condas. 

The flavor of broth, over-salted in the cooking, 
in the waters of Carlsbad is ascribed to what is 
called zoogine, which is a good, deep, obscure name 
for it, whatever it may mean. 



ANALYTICAL DIFFICULTIES. 115 

Nor is it of the slightest consequence to Mr. 
Toots or the invalid corps what it does mean, since 
those who know, but cannot tell exactly what it 
means, are disagreed as to whence it comes or what 
its object is in coming. 

It is of no consequence, but it is suggestive to 
notice how the analyst rings the changes upon and 
twists his vocabulary around the word soda and its 
synonyms ! With what tenacity and pertinacity it 
occurs in his analytical vocabulary, either alone, or 
compounded, or in disguise. By the time lie is 
through with sulphate of soda, phosphate of soda, 
carbonate of soda, bicarbonate of soda, biborate of 
soda, muriate of soda, bromide of sodium, iodide 
of sodium, and chloride of sodium, not to speak in 
our vulgar tongue of Epsom salts, and Glauber's 
salts, and oxysalt, and the salt fed to the oxen, and 
the salt you put upon your baked potato — I say by 
the time you follow your analytical expert through 
all this labyrinth, you may come to the conclusion 
that mineral water is somewhat of a salt water, and 
that when you are drinking it you are, in plain 
English, taking the memorable dose of salts of your 
childhood's happy hours. 

My authority says, " Common salt is eminently 
tonic, and, according to most physiologists, plays a 
direct and important part in digestion. It is to 
digestion what oxygen is to respiration. " 

Dr. J. Buniey Yeo, who has been at great pains 
to classify the European springs, puts all the best 



116 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

known ones under the head of " common salt 
waters," and says the strictly alkaline waters con- 
tain it also. And the more salt they contain, the 
more stimulating they are. 

Five sixths of the solid constituents of the springs 
at Wiesbaden are salt, we are told, and the rocks 
under Carlsbad are a mass of salt. 

Picking up my newspaper again, I stumble upon 
a remarkable justification of this saline point of 
view. 

An artesian well at White Plains, Nevada, has 
been arrested at twenty-three hundred feet below 
the surface by our theory. The water is so heavy 
with salt that the drill does not penetrate the rock. 

The ITermanduri and Catti, Tacitus tells us, 
fought for the country around Kissengen because 
of the salt which it contained. There is no better 
evidence of the value of chloride of sodium to the 
human carnivora than to see it reddened with the 
blood of the brave Hermanduri. 

The soldiers of Mohammed died of their exces- 
sive use of the salt they found on their march. The 
mortality was stopped by diluting it in water, or, 
in other words, by substituting mineral water for 
the mineral without the water. 

The Salt Sea is the mausoleum of Sodom and 
Gomorrah, as the Salt Lake will probably be of our 
over-married countrymen of Utah. 

Nothing could be more conclusive of the value of 
salt as a remedy than its use by the Great Teacher 



ANALYTICAL DIFFICULTIES. 11? 

as a spiritual simile. The new humanity that He 
founded were to he the salt of the earth. 

When the words of our mouth need seasoning, it 
is chloride of sodium that is prescribed for the 
purpose. 

"With all thy offerings thou shalt offer salt." 
Salt was cast upon the ram out of the flock and the 
young bullock before they were offered for a burnt- 
offering. 

Salt loses its savor by exposure to the sun, as lias 
been proved by comparing the outside with the in- 
side of the rocks in the Valley of Salt, where David 
smote the Syrians. This BUggest8 the reason why 
the dose of s;dts in our mineral water should be 
taken immediately after it reaches the surface, or 
bottled immediately, and Bold at a reasonable price 
to those whose lives are worth prolonging by its 
use. 

Not only is it true that all mineral waters are 
saline ; there is no doubt that they owe their salt- 
ness to the deep blue sea that constitutes three 
fifths of the earth's surface, and with which the 
mineral springs have direct and perpetual connec- 
tion. When the planet comes to pieces you will 
see that we are right. Pluto heats the broth that 
boils the egg at the Sprudel and the Geyser. 

It is a fact, accredited by the best of medical au- 
thority, that sea-water, pure and simple, is as effec- 
tive as a drink as it is as a bath, and the two to- 
gether, the interior and the exterior application, 



118 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

cannot be surpassed by any other mineral water for 
efficacy in scrofula, acidity, and American intensity. 

And yet sea- water has acted with the fatality of 
strychnine upon the shipwrecked sailor ! 

Then the ocean, as you would naturally infer 
from its tides, has a hydraulic-ram power, which 
enables it, by the aid of the carbonic-acid gas, to 
throb the mineral water to the surface through 
whatever channel is provided by human ingenuity 
or volcanic upheavals. 

So therefore, while analysis is valuable to the 
Chemist and physician, their analytical perplexities 
need not worry those who are seeking their lost 
powers of digestion in the mineral nectar, for there 
is not a particle of remedial virtue in analysis, 
whether chemical or ethical. Consult the mineral- 
water physician and your own experience. Try the 
water, and hold fast to it, if it is good for you ; but 
do not be in a hurry with it. Mineral water is some- 
times as obstinate as the malady it is designed to 
cure. 

Analysis for the analytical, health for the dis- 
eased, happiness for the unhappy, mineral water for 
those who are benefited by it, and Saratoga for us 
all! 



THE REMEDIAL EFFECT OF COMMON- 
SENSE. 

After you have tried everything else for your 
disorder try common-sense — not your doctor's only, 
but your own as well. Judge with your own judg- 
ment as you see with your own eyes ; reason with 
your own reason as you hear with your own ears. 

Your fellow-animals below you — the gnu, and the 
gnat, and the rest — get on and pull through without 
medical men, medicals, or minerals, with only their 
instinct, which it was the fashion before the days of 
Darwinism to despatch as something very far re- 
moved from kinship to the reason of the human 
mammal. Even now the instinct of fidelity in the 
dog, who wares you with his bark, is supposed to 
be inferior to the reason of the man, who betrays 
you with a kiss. If, then, the tortoise, with so low 
a form of reason as brute instinct, and no form of 
civilization at all, unless it be that of Utah, finds 
existence worth perpetuation, and manages to live 
in perfect health for a century or so, why may not 
we, of the highest vertebrata, share in the hardy 
livers enjoyed by the tortoise and giraffe ? 

When you put yourself under the care of a phy- 
sician, don't take yourself out from under the care 



120 



SARATOGA CHIPS. 



of jour own judgment, reason, and common-sense. 
Let the exercise of your physician's judgment act 
as a training for your own. If the doctor would 
only cultivate the common-sense of the patient, the 
wretched dupe would be the gainer, although his 
physician might be the loser. 

Analysis of the patient by the doctor and of the 
doctor by the patient is of far more importance 

than the analysis 



t 




YADDO. RESIDENCE OF SPENCER TBASTC, ESQ. 



of the water for 
either the party 
of the first part 
or the party of 
the second part. 
Dr. Proell, of 
Gastein, said he 
always made a 
point of inquir 
ing into the 
character of the 
patient before 
recommending 



and obstinate it 
Let the patient 



the waters. "If he was angry 
would be a contrary indication. " 
do the same by his physician, and take it as an in- 
dication of his contrary disposition, if he under- 
takes to make up in obstinacy and conceit what he 
lacks in experience and skill. 

The science of medicine is progressive, or, at any 
rate, the doctors find no room for improvement like 



THE REMEDIAL EFFECT OF COMMON-SENSE. 121 

the sick-room. It is the study of his patients, not 
his books, that graduates the best physician. 

One physician, Dr. De Carro, declared, after 
drinking at the Sprudel four days, that had he not 
been a physician he would have looked upon his 
violent symptoms as forerunners of apoplexy ; and 
another physician, Dr. James Johnson, says, in re- 
ply, that they were symptoms of apoplexy, and that 
but for the effect upon the bowels spoken of by the 
patient, he would have furnished a final illustration 
of the power of the Sprudel water. It was a " con- 
trary indication." 

' ' When doctors disagree, what are we to do V 
Do your own doctoring. If your remedy agrees 
with you, it is of very little consequence whether 
your physician does or not. 

So take your minerals hot, if you prefer them 
thermal, or cold, if you would rather have the 
therapeutic conditions, destitute of caloric. 

For five hundred years more or less the Carlsbad 
medical doctors restricted their Cur-guests to bath- 
ing. Then they ordered the water to be taken in- 
ternally as well as externally, and to the extent of 
sixty glasses at a dose. A century ago a member 
of the learned faculty, Dr. Tilling, followed his 
own advice, and swallowed his own prescription of 
three score glasses of Sprudel at a sitting, and has 
been dead for most of the time ever since. Com- 
mon-sense, like cooking and patriotism, is subject 
to the law of development, with variations, and its 



122 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

remedial quality grows with its use in both the 
learned faculty and the faculties of the unlearned. 

As time passed and common-sense developed, the 
amount diminished, until my medical doctor at 
Carlsbad, in 1886, restricted me to two glasses of 
Schlossbrunn, fifteen minutes between the glasses, 
five minutes and a quarter between the sips. The 
cunning dog — he was taming an American from 
the United States ! It might as well have been hot 
water from the pump at Foothold, surrounded by 
my lovely family, if I were as rational in the State 
of New York as I was compelled to be in far-away 
Bohemia ! But going to Bohemia was a factor in 
the cure, as going to Saratoga is. 

Peter the Great, who tried Carlsbad for the 
rheumatism in 1712, misunderstood his prescription 
of three glasses for three pitchers, and was stran- 
gling over pitcher number two when discovered and 
rescued by the medical member of his household, 
or the man hired by royalty to keep royalty sup- 
plied with common-sense. Man is the only animal 
who pays a fellow-animal a salary for keeping him 
furnished with common-sense. Instinct is sufficient 
where reason is deficient. 

The great Czar Peter thought nothing of making 
way with twenty -three glasses of hot Sprudel before 
breakfast, to cure his hot temper after, and wrote 
to his Empress Catherine, " Our bellies are swelled 
with water, because we drink like horses." 

With all due respect to the memory of the great 



THE KEMEDIAL EFFECT OF COMMON-SENSE. 123 

Czar Peter, he did not drink like horses — the hu- 
man animal never does. Horses know when to 
stop drinking and eating. Prohibition laws are un- 
known in the animal kingdom, except among the 
morbid vertebrata. Man is the only animal whoso 
god is his belly. If he knew as much about ther- 
mals and therapeutics as his horse, it would not be 
necessary for him to go to Carlsbad, to be taught 
how and when to drink, although he might see the 
advantage of living at Saratoga, where the other 
animals, the moose and the Mohawks, used to drink 
of chloride of sodium, but never died of it, because 
they never drank with the advice of a physician. 
u They drank like horses," and not like the great 
Czar Peter. 

An important therapeutic condition has been re- 
vealed to the learned faculty and the sensible laity 
— the out-of-doors condition. We used to drink like 
men, now we drink like horses, beyond the reach 
of the malaria of the pipes and the breathed-over 
air of the interior decorations. 

Man continues, in the course of his progress up 
and on, to fall back upon the hygienic habits of the 
animals to whom he professes to be an example in 
therapeutics and hygienics. He realizes his failure 
as the only in-door animal, and is going out-of-doors 
again. He does not drink his mineral water at Carls- 
bad now, as in the great Czar Peter's day, in a warm 
room, but in the open air. This subjects him to 
the Open-Air Treatment, which is of itself alone 



124 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

sufficient to repair his digestive apparatus and culti- 
vate his common-sense. Whatever beguiles the 
only in-door animal into the Open- Air Treatment 
is to be prescribed, and whatever interferes with it 
is to be proscribed. If drinking mineral water to 
the strains of Strauss' s waltz, in the presence of the 
whole human race, will secure the Open-Air Treat- 
ment, let us go all the way to Carlsbad to secure it ; 
but if out-of-doors at Saratoga will answer the pur- 
pose, let us buy a lot and build a house, and camp 
out «,t Saratoga. Camping out at home is a capital 
Treatment for the morbid anthropoid. 

It is largely in man that aileth to cure his ails ; 
but he needs to be on the alert and alive at the will. 

The worst effect of a disorder is the first — the 
weakening of the will. Soldiers who face the 
enemy's cannon with composure are nervous when 
touched with a disease, which will certainly be ag- 
gravated by their nervousness. The imagination 
can create a malady which the reason cannot cure. 
Physical ills make cowards of the bravest men. 
The will that gives way at the first approach of the 
disease would stand to the last in a fight w T ith a 
bear or a robber. The very sending for the doctor 
is of the nature of a surrender. It encourages the 
disposition to succumb. 

The first and indispensable step for the hypo- 
chondriac, to say nothing of the hypocrite, to take 
is to admit that he is one. 

Some of the insane know they are insane, but 



THE REMEDIAL EFFECT OF COMMON-SENSE. 125 

they are too far over the line for the information to 
be serviceable to them. It requires sanity to util- 
ize self-knowledge. Bnt the hypped may be suffi- 
ciently under the guidance of reason and will to, at 
least, make an effort to dispel the melancholy. 

Mawworm "liked to be despised," the morbid 
Cur-guest likes to be commiserated for his ills, and 
lives upon the sympathy they ensure. 

When you overhear yourself saying, " They are 
trying to cure me, I must be on my guard — I will 
not be cured," you may conclude that you are a 
crank, and prefer to be one, and will soon be worse 
than one. Then your friends will have to put you 
where they will be deprived of your society, and 
you will have your society all to yourself. 

If, when one feels the ailment approaching, one 
could only rally, stand and light, instead of going 
out to meet the enemy with the color of a Hag of 
truce in the face, and the tremor of a poltroon in 
the legs, how different might be the result of the 
battle to a useful man and a dependent family. 

Once pass the point where self-dependence is 
abandoned, and it is almost impossible to recover 
it. The disease is quick to take advantage of every 
inch yielded, and makes a prisoner of every faculty 
that is caught unarmed or sleeping at its post. 

It is a funny feat in acrobatics. It is like lifting 
one's self by the nape of the neck, but it may be 
done, and to secure the remedial aid of common- 
sense, you must see that it is done. 



126 



SARATOGA CHIPS. 



The wretched mortal who died of drinking Spru- 
del water in the last stages of heart disease, and the 
wretched mortal who perished of the bracing air of 
the Alps in the last stages of consumption, were 
martyrs to hygienic ignorance. 




FROM CARLSBAD TO SARATOGA. 

I thought it no more than fair to Wiesbaden 
to retain a portion of rny malady to be cured at 
that renowned cure-all, where again I drank, and 
bathed, and watched with unabated exhilaration an- 
other ten thousand of our disordered species do the 
same. 

Wiesbaden is a far more ambitious and preten- 
tious place than Carlsbad, and I suppose my coun- 
trymen generally would prefer it, but I prefer the 
queer Spa made illustrious by Charles IV. and his 
wounded hound. 

However, I was quite content with Wiesbaden, 
and have a pleasant recollection of its springs " that 
from my members took away the sense of weariness, 
unmanning body and mind." 

Here again I drank from a boiling crater, and 
burnt my tongue at the Kockbrunnen. One is 
struck here, as at Carlsbad, with the abundance, 
superabundance, of this boiling water from the 
subterranean boiler. The gutters run with it and 
steam with it, and it finally finds its way through 
pipes into the Rhine. Rising at the centre of the 
globe, it flows over its surface, and probably gets 
back into the kettle where it was at first heated. 



128 



SARATOGA CHIPS. 



The noble Romans, in their hurried retreat be- 
fore the arrows of the Germans, left some of their 
bones behind. You may dig up and hang on your 
watch-chain a bit of the jaw which called for the 
onset of the Twenty-second Legion upon the Dutch 
lines, when that jaw had reached as high a degree 
of civilization as that of Germany to-day, and when 
the Teutons were as barbarous as the brigands that 

now way lay the 
traveller on the 
Campagna at 
Rome. This 
world has more 
revoluti ons 
than the one 
upon its axis 
and the one 
around the sun. 

As with pic- 
tures, so with 
scenery and places of note. Returning by way of 
" the Rhine, the Rhine, the free, the German 
Rhine," I came very near joining all the other pas- 
sengers in not seeing it for the second time, because 
I was so diverted by the other passengers, who spent 
their entire time in not seeing it. 

Man is a greater curiosity than any of his works, 
and a far more imposing bit of ruins than any to be 
seen on the banks of the Rhine. 




RESIDENCE OF S. GIFFOBD SLOCUM, ESQ. 



FROM CARLSBAD TO SARATOGA. 129 

Three jolly fat Dutchmen and their three wives 
snoozed and snored as we gayly sailed along on the 
ugly old steamer over the beautiful old Rhine ; two 
American felt hats plunged at one another like a 
Punch and Judy show in a vehement controversy 
over the American tariff ; an Englishman was re- 
pudiating Home Rule to every other Englishman 
he could lay his tongue on ; a French family of five 
preferred the Rhine wine to the Rhine scenery, and 
the wine of the Rhine land is very palatable ; a 
group of Bavarians saw the fascinating castles at 
the bottom of their glasses of native beer ; a party 
of kids played whist in the cabin, and one of them 
built a castle of his own that he preferred to the 
castles on the shore. It was a castle in the air and 
the future, suggested by the pretty Scutch lass who 
was gazing dreamily down into the tranquil water 
of the famous stream. 

I confess that the illustrious river Rhine is to be 
gone over to be got rid of. It preys upon you like 
an appetite. You tire of telling the truth to in- 
quisitive impertinence. Finally, rather than say 
you have seen it, when you know perfectly well that 
you have not, you purchase your ticket, and do the 
illustrious river Rhine in its unpoetical little steam- 
boat with the deliberation of a man who is about to 
commit a burglary. 

There was the stupendous statue of the mighty 
Germania, that I heard Kaiser William proclaim 
from the steps of the palace at Versailles, in 1871. 



130 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

It will see another struggle for the memorable 
river, and when its waters run clear again after 
that, they will never again be reddened with brave 
blood or reflect the flying shell. After that the 
god of the Rhine may sleep on guard. 

As I was leaning on the rail, looking into the 
transparent countenance of the Rhine, I saw a 
greater monument than that of mighty Germania 
and a more pathetic ruin than any that I saw upon 
the hills, for 1 saw floating there the ashes of John 
Huss ! They will float there forever, and the 
waters* of the Rhine will be consecrated by them, 
and every one who touches these waters, remember- 
ing these ashes, will feel a baptism of water, ashes, 
and fire, and " swear by the great oath of the 
blessed gods" that they will never forget John 
Huss. 

1 had not seen Paris since I was shut up in it for 
four months, watching the gay Parisians defend it 
and destroy it. There was only here and there a 
trace of that awful humiliation, which was felt by 
everybody except those upon whom it was inflicted. 

The Vendome Column was high up in the air 
again, with the little corporal on the top of it, with 
his eye upon the war office at Berlin, and the Hotel 
de Ville looked as stately, and compact, and erect 
as though neither it nor I had seen the revolution 
that tore it to pieces. I sat down near by on a 
bench, and listened to the chimes of Notre Dame : 



FROM CARLSBAD TO SARATOGA. 131 

but the reminiscences of the place were so depress- 
ing that I was glad to join the jolly sippers on the 
boulevards, and even to join them for the moment 
in the dream that we are all but fantastic shapes in 
a phantasmagoria. 

I looked into everybody's face in vain to find 
my comrades of the siege. The places that knew 
them know them no more, and none knew me 
where I used to luxuriate on horse soup, canine 
steak, and mousc-on-toast. 

The Restless Club was one day in Paris discussing 
the comparative merits of London and Paris, when 
it was said, " This is civilization — that is sniveliza- 
tion !" But it was resolved that no such cynicism 
as that should appear upon the minutes of the club. 

As I was sitting in one of the twenty-five cstah- 
lissements Duval, I recalled the famous restau- 
rateur who was there when I was there last. His 
eating-houses have the best food for the money in 
that capital of cheap victuals and expensive politics. 
You can dine at Duval's on three courses and vui 
ordinaire for twenty-five cents. 

Duval lived and died a butcher and a humani- 
tarian. He carved his name on the science of gas- 
tronomy with a carving-knife, and hewed a path up 
to a palace and a coat-ol'-arnis, which ought to have 
been a soup-plate and a meat-axe. lie was an 
humble " child of the people,'' when it occurred to 
him that the odds and ends of the butcher's bench 
would make not only a low-priced but a wholesome 



132 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

and nutritious broth. He accordingly fitted up a 
part of his butchery as an eating-room for working 
people, and from that he rose to be the largest and 
cheapest feeder of the Parisians that Paris has ever 
known. His feeding-troughs are thronged. You 
know exactly what everything is to cost, inclusive 
of the waiting-maid, before you begin to eat or 
drink. He took the side of wages by making the 
gratuity a specified wage. 

Duval taught some hotel-keepers what others of 
them will never leaTn, that it is possible to be rea- 
sonable in price without being unreasonably filthy, 
and that if a plate of food cost but little money, it 
may still be well cooked and well served. He died 
without a title, but he certainly deserved to be 
knighted for his soup, if Bass did for his beer. He 
never lost his grip on his broth, and would tolerate 
no cook who departed from his recipe in the mak- 
ing of it v and I never eat a meal in one of his res- 
taurants without drinking a bowl of broth to the 
memory of Duval, the butcher and benefactor. 

The French still lead the world of letters in im- 
aginative rhetoric. " Paris en Amerique," for ex- 
ample, is wonderfully accurate, and I am not at all 
surprised to hear that the piquant Parisian who 
wrote it has never seen America. He has seen 
Americans, and he is a Frenchman with a French- 
man's bump of ideality. 

Instructive and exciting tours through the jungles 



FROM CARLSBAD TO SARATOGA. 133 

of India and the huts of Yucatan are taken with 
every comfort on a good salary in New York. 

To say the truth, it is very doubtful whether see- 
ing a country is any advantage to those who wish 
to write about it intelligently and accurately. It is 
like reading the book you are about to review or 
seeing the battle you are obliged to describe — it 
prevents a judicial attitude of mind. 

If you have been hospitably entertained, you are 
under bonds to keep the peace about what you saw 
that made you laugh. If you have proved an un- 
appreciated lecturer, you can hardly be expected to 
see anything to admire in our political institutions ; 
or if you find the lecture field a mine of gold, un- 
mixed with quartz, as Dickens did on his second 
visit, you will be quite willing to retract all the 
funny things you said at our expense on your first 
visit. 

If it be true that historians, in order to be trust- 
worthy, must have no part or lot in the events which 
they narrate, it may be maintained, with no less 
plausibility, that there is only one person worse 
qualified for writing about a country than the per- 
son who knows nothing about it, and that is the 
person who knows a little about it. This little 
knowledge certainly is " a dangerous thing. " To 
know all about a country is out of the question, to 
know something about it is confusing, hence it is 
better for the historian or map-maker to know 
nothing at all about it from observation. 



134 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

I asked the late Dr. Alexander Keith Johnston 
why he, who had made so many maps of America, 
had never visited it. He replied that if he should 
see the country he would never be satisfied with his 
maps of it. Before he went East he made maps of 
it with ease ; since his return he had not made one 
to suit him. 

As I was a looker-on at the war between Na- 
poleon III. and William I., I was awake to all that 
might bear upon a renewal of those hostilities. 
There will never be permanent peace between these 
two nations until there is another war between 
them. Germany feels the difficulty of keeping 
down the bully she has thrown, and the desire for 
revenge is burning under every decoration in 
France. It is possible that France has the larger 
army of the two, but Germany still has what 
she had in 1870, the superiority in staff, in disci- 
pline, and in position, moral and geographical. It 
may be greatly to her advantage if she shall be 
as clearly in the right at the next encounter as 
she was at the last ; but France is down, and her 
Emperor was a fool, and the world appreciates an 
effort in the under dog to get upon his feet, and is. 
not destitute of sympathy with Nemesis. I find 
the Parisians just as jaunty over a tussle with Ger- 
many as I found them when, in 1870, they packed 
their baggage-wagons for Berlin. Boulanger is as 
confident as Ollivier said he was. French conceit is 
a monomania. 



FROM CARLSBAD TO SARATOGA. 135 

Then, time and death, the Frenchman thinks, will 
play into his hands. Prince Frederick Charles, 
who could get so much out of the legs as well as 
arms of his troops, is gone ; so is Falkenstein, the 
terrific lighter, who infused his own hatred of the 
French into his followers. Von Moltke, the mighty 
planner of battles, is very old, and his powerful 
master is older, and even Bismarck, the iron staff 
of the old Emperor and the young empire, may not 
be here when the bugle calls to another rally on 
the Rhine. So France may reason, and plot while 
she reasons, and drill while she waits for the hour 
to strike for the recovery of Alsace and Lorraine. 

But it is important to France to bear in mind 
that the siege of Paris was a training-school in artil- 
lery, whose graduates will be felt in the next march 
upon beautiful Vanity Fair. No one can realize 
the benefit of this training-school to Germany as 
well as those who saw it, except those who were in it. 

Even if France should win back her provinces, 
she would be no nearer Berlin than when she started 
for the Prussian capital under the third and fourth 
Bonapartes — the latter no more childish than the 
former — while if Germany wins, the sword of the 
Teuton will cut in twain the land of the Gaul, and 
France will sink to a nation of the third class, there 
to remain forever. 

One of the multitudinous motives the traveller 
may have in mind is to get some of " the points of 



136 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

interest" off his mind. His object in seeing it is 
to say he has seen it. He may not wish to be 
talked down by the colloquial run-a-round, who is 
addicted to exclaiming, " And you didn't go down 
into that coal-mine in Hoboken ! ! ! Well, you 
did miss it ! Why, it was worth the whole of the 
grand tour ! I wouldn't have missed it for the 
world !" 

Go where you will, one of these chronics will go 
where you could not be hired to go, and your only 
hope pf estopping him is to go there, too. 

There are some very ugly and ancient towns and 
some uninteresting objects of vast renown that you 
can get rid of very comfortably and expeditiously, 
by stopping over a train and cramming for your ex- 
amination when you resume your journey or at 
your journey's end. 

But you do not visit Paris or the Alps, the Old 
World of Greece or of Rome, or the great world 
of London, in order to say that you have seen 
them. These are lions that necessitate more than a 
stop-over or a hop, skip, and jump, Baedecker in 
hand. They require going away from and going 
back to. Having got rid of the rest of the world, 
you will spend the remainder of your life on these, 
and be fascinated more and more by them as your 
visits multiply in number and increase in length. 

When you can make the North Atlantic voyage 
simply and solely to gaze slowly day after day upon 
Mont Blanc, and stroll day in and day out along 



FROM CARLSBAD TO SARATOGA. 137 

the Parisian boulevards, and roll all over the capital 
of the whole world on the top of a London omnibus, 
you have just begun to be the traveller who ac- 
quires the education which only travelling can im- 
part. Nay, you might even tire of the gay streets 
and shops of Paris and feel so oppressed by the 
awful mountains as to flee from their presence, 
but of London you will never tire. 

After all our wanderings we settle down in Lon- 
don, as the culmination and the end of all travel. 
Oh, the worlds within worlds of the wonderful 
world of London ! 

The impression of immensity is nowhere else so 
vivid, permanent, or profound. Vast tracts of un- 
inhabited prairie have no such effect. They are 
unsubstantial. It is the influence of vacuity. It 
requires population to satisfy the imagination with 
a sense of vastness. Yastness needs substance. 
Our venerable American joke of stepping off the 
island of Great Britain was found to be an unex- 
pected compliment when set against the history of 
the stepping off which the little island has done. 
Besides, continents of soil are thrown up by the 
earthquake, cities are the work of man and the 
growth of ages. We are not indebted to the square 
miles of Texas for the brains of Greece. Real 
estate is hardly worth bragging of where it is not 
worth taking as a gift. You are in no danger of 
stepping off the Desert of Sahara. 

Everything, and everybody, and every book is in 



138 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

London — monarchy and the republic of letters, the 
Lord Mayor and the mob of a million, the British 
Museum and Westminster Abbey and the dyna- 
miters, the Queen on her throne and the paupers 
under it, and Parliament in the fog, Cheapside 
and the Strand, and the Bank of England, and 
Bow bells, which chimed out " Auld Lang Syne" 
as I rode by on the top of the 'bus, whose conductor 
was crying lustily, " Here you are, Charing Cross, 
penny all the way !" 

While I was worshipping in the Abbey a man 
fell dead at the foot of Pitt's statue. My devotions 
were quite incongruous with the envy that I felt. 

The great Metropolitan Railway of London is a 
marvel of subterranean transit and gloomy con- 
venience. The stations are well named for stations 
on the road of progress. They are called " Col- 
man's Mustard," "Stephen's Ink," " Pear's 
Soap," " Mrs. Allen's Hair-Restorer," and " Dunn- 
vill's Old Irish Whiskey," which is " regularly 
supplied to the House of Lords." 

A London physician said to me in his office, 
u Listen !" We listened ! It was the roar of the 
London streets. 

" That," said he, " is what is grinding us up." 

" What a privilege," I said, " to be ground up 
in such a mill !" 

London has ground some fine grain and some 
white flour since I was there last. 



FROM CARLSBAD TO SARATOGA. 139 

H. and I went one Sunday afternoon to the grave 
of " George Eliot," at Highgate. There were 
very few persons about, and none of those knew 
whom we meant when we asked to be shown the 
tomb that contains the ashes of England's greatest 
novelist and most intellectual woman. We were 
indeed seeking the living among the dead. 

At last we found the grave, and were glad to 
find it free from every form and degree of cemetery 
rhodomontade. The plain headstone contained an 
apt quotation from her pen, for she was indeed one 

" Of those immortal souls who live again 
In minds made better by their presence." 

Under this were the words : 

" Here lies the body of 
' George Eliot,' Mary Ann Cross, 
Born 22 November, 1819 ; Died 22 December, 1880." 

The loneliness and silence were oppressive. The 
roar of the vast metropolis had ceased and the busy 
hive of the living was almost as quiet as this city of 
the dead. Never did I feel as I felt there and 
then the power of the dead to draw the living. 
There is no grave in England more attractive or 
affecting than that of " George Eliot." 

The American Bar has made great advances in 
Europe since I was there last, and there can hardly 
be a doubt that Congo will soon feel that exhila- 
rating effect of its presence that was felt long ago by 



140 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

Lo, the poor Indian, whose untutored mind is no 
match for ours in the noble art of barter. 

To prove what strides the American Bar has 
made in the ingenuity and multiplicity of its bev- 
erages, as well as in the multiplicity and ingenuity 
of its orators, I must give its bill of fare as I found 
it in London : 

Prairie Oyster ; Gin Twist ; Brandy Twist ; 
Whiskey Twist ; Straights ; Livener ; Night-cap ; 
Gin Sour ; Brandy Sour ; Whiskey Sour ; Eye- 
opener : Bourbon Skin ; Rye Skin ; Fixes ; Ap- 
petizer ; Gin Cocktail ; Brandy Cocktail ; Bourbon 
Cocktail ; Rye Cocktail ; Lady's Delight ; Flip- 
flap ; Flash of Lightning ; Pick-me-up ; Swizzle ; 
Brandy and Orange ; Brandy and Lemon ; Boston 
Flip ; Whiskey Crusta ; Knickerbocker ; Maiden's 
Blush ; Corpse Reviver ; Bosom Caresser ; Poussee 
1' Amour ; Creme de Noyeau Cocktail ; Champagne 
Cocktail ; Tom and Jerry ; Promenade Punch ; 
Apple- Jack Punch ; Boston Punch ; Milk Punch ; 
Army Punch ; Victoria Punch ; Appolonic Punch ; 
New York Punch ; Favorite Punch ; Port-wine 
Punch ; Philadelphia Punch ; Sangaree ; Whiskey 
Sling ; Egg-nog ; Italian Lemonade ; Whiskey 
Skin ; Bourbon Skin ; Black Stripe ; Blue Blazer ; 
Mother's Milk ; Leave-it- to Me ; Lemon Squash ; 
American Lemonade ; Claret Cup ; Fruit Punch ; 
Soda Cocktail ; Claret Punch ; Gin Sling ; Brandy 
Sling ; Stone Fence : John Collins ; Sherry Cob- 
bler ; Brandy Punch ; Mixed Punch ; Pineapple 



FROM CARLSBAD TO SARATOGA. 141 

Punch ; Fifth Avenue Iced Punch ; Champagne 
Cup ; Champagne Cobbler ; Hatfield ; Old Kentucky 
Bourbon ; Nonpareil Eye ; Peach Brandy ; St. Croix 
Rum ; Jamaica Rum ; New England Rum ; S tough - 
ton Bitters ; Boker's Bitters ; Angostura Bitters ; 
Criterion Bitters ; Curacoa ; Swedish Punches ; 
President Lincoln ; Stonewall Jackson ; General 
Grant ; and Ice Cream Fruit Drinks, flavored with 
Ginger, Vanilla, Pineapple, Nectar, Raspberry, 
Strawberry, Lemon, or Orange. 

I was particularly impressed with the multiplicity 
and brilliancy of this menu of drinks when I com- 
pared them with those that I found upon my bill 
of fare at the restaurant of the London Young 
Men's Christian Association. They are called 
" Temperance Drinks," and are as follows : 

Quinine Tonic ; Potassa Water ; Soda and Milk ; 
Lemon Squash ; Orange Champagne ; Champagne 
Cider ; Zoedone ; Zoedone Split. 

My curiosity tempted me to experiment with 
these beverages, but I recalled my vows to the god- 
dess Ilygeia, and resisted and abstained. Had I 
not practised total abstinence I would have been 
obliged to return to Carlsbad. 

I returned on The Atlantic Ocean, and there were 
several eccentric happenings on The Atlantic Ocean. 
The stewardess fell downstairs and broke her 
neck, and the saloon passengers repaired it by a 
concert in the cabin. A son of a United States Sen- 



142 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

ator struck out at a fellow-passenger over a game of 
cards. A U.S.N, furlough and an H.B.M.A. fur- 
lough went into an alliance of uninterrupted inebri- 
ation. A priest, and a pretty one, returned from a 
professional tour in the steerage with a black eye, 
and the captain gave the assailant the choice of a 
court-martial or a civil court. He chose the latter. 
Even Republics do not tolerate Republicanism on 
shipboard. The heat crazed the poor stoker, and 
he was put into a strait- jacket, as the U.S.N. 
and ELB.M.A. should have been. 

The tidal wave from Charleston lifted us away up 
and let us away down, which caused the hysterical 
lady to shriek and the invalid widow to faint. 
How we did tumble about, and how we did feel 
anything but entirely well and strong ! The young 
man in the adjoining berth above me leaned out, 
and remarked that this was his eighteenth time 
across, and he never was sea-sick, but he was loathe 
to descend, and I begged that he would draw in 
his head. 

The bbs were busy b's, gathering the arterial 
every hour of the night from every opening they 
could make in a jDassenger, with as little, regard to 
the price of his passage as the company had when 
it assigned the berths ; roaches multiplied, dirt was 
thick and ancient and everywhere, and the Chicago 
lawyer found his breeches in the morning half-way 
down a rat-hole. 

Those who were not sick of the ocean old and 



FROM CARLSBAD TO SARATOGA. 143 

melancholy gray had their stomachs turned by the 
instability and nncleanliness of the vessel. 

There were said to be thirteen hundred and forty- 
two of ns, not counting the insects. We were 
packed away and stowed away with scrupulous re- 
gard for the comfort of the company. 

The captain wore a tortoise-shell visor on his cap, 
a transparent device for captivating the ladies, with 
whom he promenaded the deck arm-in-arm. lie 
also wore kid gloves on his fat hands and gray 
gaiters under black trousers, which gave him the 
appearance of wearing his stockings over his shoes. 
Gaiters and trousers should always be of the same 
color. 

The ship's medical doctor told ns that he was 
never sea-sick, and that sea-sickness is caused by 
dizziness of the brain. Those who have no brain 
have nothing about them susceptible to sea- sick- 
ness. These we called the Duffers. They were as 
large around the apron as they were brief around 
the temples. They broke every known law of 
hygienics, and were, in consequence, perfectly 
happy. They smoked, and swilled, and gorged, and 
played cards, and slept as peacefully as babes in 
their mothers' arms. 

It was exasperating to see these Duffers go down 
to every meal and come up every morning fresh 
and smiling. 1 was quite willing the ship should 
go down, if it would only take them down with it. 
But they would probably be saved. 



144 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

Finally, it was agreed that the healthiest and 
happiest-looking one of the Duffer Club should be 
tried by court-martial, and if found guilty of being 
as contented as lie appeared, he was to be sewed np 
in his night-gown and lowered tenderly but fear- 
lessly into some obscure nook of the deep blue sea, 
with many happy returns of the day, so far as all of 
his comrades were concerned. 

The pilot ran us aground as soon as he could 
find ground sufficient for the purpose, and then into 
a wharf barge, and came very near squelching a 
Dutch steamer in his multitudinous squirms about 
the dock. 

Finally, however, we landed in the arms of the 
great American Tariff, which expects every Cus- 
tom House officer to do his duty on kid gloves and 
the pretty little mementoes for the old folks at 
home or the girl I left behind me. 

Xenophon's plucky army of ten thousand Greeks 
may cry, " Thalatta ! thalatta !" as they gaze once 
more upon their Black Sea, but give me the cry of 
" Land-ho !" at the masthead. 




THE MINERAL-WATER TREATMENT 
HERE AND THERE. 

The attitude of the learned faculty and the Cur- 
guests of Europe toward the Mineral- Water (Jure is 
well represented by Carlsbad, and the attitude of 
the learned faculty and the disordered citizens of 
the United States is well represented by Saratoga. 
They are at opposite poles of the mineral-water 
world, and it is high time for them to come nearer 
together. Be it the benign object of this book t<> 
bring them together. As my observation and testi- 
mony are that of a layman, it will be wise for me 
to secure the opinion of American physicians who 
are conversant with the facts in both this country 
and Europe. I have consulted several, and all con- 
cur with the one whom I now quote, Dr. Clarence 
C. Rice, of New York, who published a sensible 
and valuable article in the New York Medical 
Journal for October 1:6th, 1886, on ''How the 
Therapeutic Value of Our Mineral-Springs may be 
Increased." 

Dr. Ttice took pains, while visiting the foreign 
springs, to gather the opinions of his profession 
with respect to the Mineral-Water Cure, and his 
conclusions are as valuable as they are disinterested. 



146 



SARATOGA CHIPS. 



He was u impressed with the enthusiasm of the 
European physicians over their mineral waters. 
They seemed never tired of talking of them, and 
have great faith in their curative properties. " 

In Europe the Mineral- Water Treatment has 
cc the endorsement of the medical profession." 

" Mineral- Water Treatment forms quite a large 
portion of the therapeutics recommended by Yon 

J^iemeyer in his 
'Text-Book of 
Medicine, 5 and 
he speaks in no 
doubtful man- 
ner, as, for ex- 
ample : ' In our 
present state of 
knowledge, a 
course of water 
at Carlsbad is 
the measure 
which should 
deserve the chief 
reliance as a 
remedy for diabetes mellitus.' In the treatment of 
renal calculus, Sir Henry Thompson says, ' Of all 
medicinal remedies, perhaps none are so valuable as 
mineral waters ;' and Trousseau and Murchison 
speak in the same emphatic terms in respect to the 
treatment of other diseases." 

In this country Dr. Rice has been struck with 




-«^J|^'-- 



RESIDENCE OF W. B. GAGE, ESQ. 



THE MINERAL-WATER TREATMENT. 147 

" the half-hearted manner in which the physicians 
advised the use of the mineral waters. The high- 
est praise they could pay them was that they could 
do no harm." 

Dr. Rice advocates a concert of action on the 
part of the practitioners of this country, similar to 
that of the faculty in Europe. 

" I do not mean subscribing to the advertisement 
of any company who are bottling the waters of 
some spring, but physicians, individually or in 
committees, appointed for the purpose, should have 
careful analyses made, and they should ascertain by 
clinical investigation the therapeutical value of our 
mineral waters, and if they are found to be valu- 
able medicinal agents, they should be given a place 
as such in our materia medicas. " 

My observing and interviewing lead me to the 
same conclusion as that at which Dr. Rice has ar- 
rived. The European physician prescribes mineral 
water as a remedy in which he has enthusiastic con- 
fidence ; the American physician recommends it as, 
at best, a beverage which may have remedial quali- 
ties. Of course there are exceptions, but this, as 
Dr. Rice affirms, is the rule. 

So when we take into consideration the fact that 
the mineral springs of Europe are under municipal 
control, in some cases owned by the national gov- 
ernment, which prevents rivalry and insures cheap- 
ness, and are endorsed by the medical learning of 
all Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Khedive's do- 



148 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

minions, we have no difficulty in accounting for the 
enormous number of people who visit the European 
springs, and the vast amount of money they leave 
behind them when they mount the train for home. 
The rulers believe in these springs, the doctors be- 
lieve in them, the hotel proprietors believe in them, 
the fashionable dyspeptics believe in them, and the 
poor, who have no drugs to pay for or doctors to 
pay, believe in them, for the Mineral-Water Treat- 
ment is open to the poorest, without money and 
witho # ut price. The motto is, " Ho, every one that 
thirsteth, come." 

The financial interests of the State, the faculty, 
and the hostelries combine with the mental credulity 
and bodily infirmities of the morbid anthropoid to 
bear the mineral- water traffic. 

Carlsbad, then, in the magnitude and magnifi- 
cence of its conveniences for the Mineral- Water 
Treatment, including drinking and bathing, has, as 
we have seen, all of Europe, and all of Asia, and all 
the Eastern world on its side. 

It has antiquity and the majority on its side. 

The Mineral-Water Treatment was the first Treat- 
ment, was once the universal Treatment, and is to 
this hour the most prevalent Treatment. 

It was practised by the ancient Egyptians and 
the ancient Greeks and Eomans, with a solemn 
sense of gratitude to the gods. 

The temples of Esculapius are found near mineral 
springs. The Greek doctors prescribed mineral 



THE MINERAL-WATER TREATMENT. 149 

waters, not to humor their patients, but to cure their 
humors. 

The Mineral- Water Treatment has the whole 
animal creation on its side. Man was not the first 
animal to be benefited by mineral water, nor are 
we, who know how to read and write, the only 
members of our family who know of its efficacy. 
The aboriginal American drank of the Saratoga 
waters long before they cured the dyspepsia of their 
civilized successors. 

All the animals below us drink of the mineral 
springs with alacrity and relish. They are as fond 
of salt as we are, and gather at the " salt licks" 
with all the regularity and hilarity with which their 
human superiors throng the hotels of Saratoga 
and Carlsbad. Such, indeed, is the accuracy of 
the instinct of the ruminants at Vichy, that the 
fashionable invalids are guided by it. When the 
spring comes, and the snow melts, and the winds 
from the mountains drive away the vapors from the 
vallevs, the beasts of the forests flock to the 
waters, for it is then that the waters are at their 
best, and it is then that " the season" is pronounced 
" open" by the world of fashion and disease. 

Indeed, it is maintained by eminent members of 
the learned faculty that more remedies have been 
discovered by the instinct of animals and barbarians 
than by the reasoning of the books or the experi- 
ence of the practitioners. 

Horses were cured of epizooties at Vichy, in 



150 SARATOGA CHIPS. 



1818, by drinking of what is used by man as a 
"table water." Does it change in composition 
or does it have a different effect upon different 
branches of the ascending scale ? 

The sjDring at Inverleitben, which enjoys the dis- 



called Doo Well, because of the doo-ing sound of 
the voices of the pigeons that gather there to drink. 
Those at Saratoga might be called cooing, because 
of the lovers who come there to coo. 

The springs at Bagnoles owe their discovery, we 
are told, to their rejuvenating effect upon an aged 
horse. The owner, thoughtlessly supposing that 
a bullet in the horse's head was more cruel than 
death by starvation and exposure, turned the poor 
old brute out to die. Two months after, as he hap- 
pened to be passing, the horse galloped toward him, 
vigorous, fat, and sleek. The astonished owner 
found, upon watching the brute, that he was accus- 
tomed to wallow in a marsh, which was found to be 
quite hot. This led to the discovery of the hot 
spring, which has ever since been noted for its effi- 
cacy in renewing the health of the animal creation, 
biped and quadruped. 

The discovery of the Schlangenbad Waters is 
quite as pathetic and authentic. It is the story 
of a restored heifer. Her association with the 
human family resulted in her sharing its dyspepsia. 
Nothing agreed with her. She grew thinner and 
thinner, her hips protruded, and she became a con- 



THE MINERAL-WATER TREATMENT. 151 

firmed hypochondriac. She was given up by her 
doctor, her owner, and the milkmaid. Then she 
suddenly disappeared, and everybody supposed she 
went on imitating our species to the point of " sui- 
cide while in a state of unsound mind," when she 
reappeared, entirely restored. Her eye was clear, 
her skin smooth, she had " grown fat as the heifer 
at grass," and her tenderloin steak had grown pro- 
portionately tempting. The herdsman shadowed 
her, and traced her to a fountain of mineral water 
far away in the forest. There she would pause for 
a moment, as if saying a Quaker grace, then drank 
slowly, and then walked slowly back to the herd. 
This is how we come to have the spring of silicious 
matter and delicious water in the little Duchy of 
Nassau. The herdsman who acted the detective on 
the heifer recommended the water to a maiden of 
Nassau who was afflicted with the heifer's malady, 
and was as speedily and radically cured. 

Sick horses are taken great distances to the 
springs of La Raillere, where they drink vigorously 
and are cured speedily. At Gastein the work-horses 
are strengthened by a bath which renders idle horses 
and idle boys unmanageable. The farmers of Aus- 
tria send their cattle to bathe in the waters of 
Schlangenbad. 

Bladud became a leper, and was banished by his 
father, King Hudibras, whereupon lie infected 
some pigs with his leprosy. The pigs were cured 
by drinking the waters of Bath, and Bladud fol- 



152 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

lowed their example, with the same beneficent re- 
sult. 

Here, however, we may as well consider the com- 
mon question, which is well worthy of consider- 
ation, Cannot this Mineral- Water Treatment be 
practised at home ? Undoubtedly it can to a con- 
siderable extent, even where the mineral water is 
" on draught," with different names for the same 
beverage. Many a man of great usefulness in his 
day and generation would have perished in his first 
struggle for existence, if he had been dependent for 
his sustenance upon " nature's fount." But if 
that is closed against you, the next best thing is 
the bottle, whether the treatment be lacteal or 
saline. The original sources are always to be pre- 
ferred, however, whether in the case of caseine, 
the sacred books, or chloride of sodium. Hence, 
the mineral springs themselves are to be preferred 
to the artificial founts for the Mineral- Water Treat- 
ment, and hence that Treatment certainly can be 
practised at home, if your home is Saratoga. 

However, if home means business, grinding and 
consuming business, whether a man's in the shop 
or a woman's in the house, it will be necessary to go 
away from home to get away from the grind, care, 
and worry, no matter where the home may be. 

You may be the better for a new gallery of faces. 
You may even wish to try a worse climate, in order 
to demonstrate the superiority of your own, which 
you are sure to do if you move east or west, north 



THE MIXEKAL-WATER TREATMENT. 153 

or south of Saratoga. The prodigal son must come 
to himself, the morbid vertebrate must get away 
from himself. To Carlsbad or Saratoga he may 
have to go, in order to give the mind a rest and the 
liver a jog. 

The provisions made at Carlsbad for distracting 
the mind of the business-ridden American from his 
exhausting occupation at home are prodigious. 
There is so much that is amusing in the crowds 
and so much that is beguiling in the landscape, that 
the most sourly in earnest American is cured of his 
morbid devotion to his country or his kind. 

He gets himself taken clean out of himself, and 
gets himself cleaned out as well. He sees nothing 
that he sees at home, and knows nobody that he 
knows at home, and does nothing that he is accus- 
tomed to do at home. He even ceases to be dead in 
earnest, which is a great relief to not only himself, 
but to all his comrades and associates. 

Then, if distance lends enchantment to the rem- 
edy, it will promote the efficacy of the Treatment. 
A foreign tour, in acting upon the credulous imagi- 
nation, facilitates the action of the water on the 
system. Or if it is the foreign tour itself that ef- 
fects the cure by the mineral water, the tour is as 
indispensable as the water. The merit of the chlo- 
rides consists in their being so difficult of access and 
so expensive to reach. 

This is why it is that we are obliged to go abroad 
in order to secure the benefit of the remedy that we 



154 SAKAT0GA CHIPS. 

leave behind at home. It is not the same remedy, 
inasmuch as going away to get it is just what makes 
it efficacious. This is not satirical or ironical. It 
is ministering to a mind diseased, which is done 
by every physician who ministers to a diseased 
body. 

I do not believe there is enough difference be- 
tween the waters of Carlsbad and those of Saratoga 
(especially if the latter are heated) to make any dif- 
ference in the efficacy of the Mineral-Water Treat- 
ment. For three years I have been an inveterate 
drinker of Saratoga mineral waters, and shall never 
cease to be grateful to them so long as I am free 
from the distressing sensations which they have re- 
moved. Nor can I doubt for a moment that these 
waters can do what any other mineral waters can 
do. Their efficacy is as well assured as those of any 
valley- in the world. 

It is the opinion of Professor Tyndall that there 
are " no thermo-electric conditions that could cause 
any perceptible difference between the therapeutic 
action of natural hot water and artificial hot water." 
This makes the artificial hot water of Saratoga 
just as therapeutic as the water fresh from the crater 
of the Carlsbad volcano. Other scientists may dis- 
agree with the learned professor, and leave us 
stranded on the bleak exposure of our own com- 
mon-sense. 

Hot springs have this advantage of the cold, they 
take a stronger hold of the morbid imagination of 



THE MINERAL-WATER TREATMENT. 155 

the invalid vertebrate. He likes his remedy to have 
a temperature as well as a twang. Hence thermal 
water is more popular, although from its inferiority 
in minerals it may be less likely to be effective. 

On the other hand, the cold spring has the ad- 
vantage of having nothing but its mineral merits to 
recommend it. Like a candidate for Congress, if 
it fails of constituents, it fails of election. 

Cold springs must be meritorious, irrespective of 
climate, scenery, or historical associations. Hot 
springs may have nothing but their temperature to 
excite the hopes and beguile the imagination. Here 
is where the Mind Cure lends a hand. 

Dr. Rice testifies that u Carlsbad has not a greater 
reputation for curing people so much because its 
waters are better medicinally than those of Sara- 
toga, as because patients at Carlsbad are under bet- 
ter therapeutic conditions." In other words, Carls- 
bad means the Carlsbad Treatment, which is in the 
main a Mineral- Water Treatment, while Saratoga 
means, as I have endeavored to show elsewhere, far 
more than any kind of Treatment, except that which 
includes them all — climate, water, rest, home, and 
gayety. But the fact that Saratoga means more 
than the Mineral-Water Treatment, so far from 
proving that that Treatment should be neglected, 
proves that it should be incorporated and main- 
tained in all its features and to its full extent, in 
baths, drink, and diet. The Saratoga waters are 
not only just as effective as those of Carlsbad, but 



156 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

compass by their variety a much larger number of 
people who need them. 

There is no excuse for the absence of the Mineral- 
Water Treatment at Saratoga to be found in its 
waters, while every other therapeutic condition is 
supplied beyond any other spa between the two 
poles of this hemisphere — climate, location, ac- 
commodations for people in all stages of consump- 
tion and impecuniosity, and opportunity for home- 
life all the year round. Those who delight in the 
mineral elixir of Saratoga, whether they use it as a 
cure or as a beverage, will never know the luxury 
of it until they can dip it from the fountain and 
drink it at their leisure. I am satisfied that that 
opportunity is an important factor in the Mineral- 
Water Cure. 

Let us not be misunderstood. The Mineral- Water 
Treatment, bath and all, is certainly practised at 
Saratoga (one spring gave two thousand baths last 
year), but not with such publicity, and emphasis, and 
advertisement as to rival the foreign establishments 
and to divert the stream of Cur-guests, who are 
flocking in increasing numbers every year to the 
waters of Carlsbad and the bath-tubs of Baden- 
Baden. 

Our mineral-water establishments should, like 
those of Europe and the Orient, assert with archi- 
tectural emphasis their place and part in the econ- 
omy of recuperation. They should be as conspicu- 
ous as our hotels and as widely known. They 



THE MIX Ell A L- WATER TREATMENT. 157 

would rival the hotels in drawing power, and pre- 
vent the necessity of closing them just when beauti- 
ful October spreads her banquet for the Cur-guest. 

Even if the Treatment is no more than one of the 
fussinesses resorted to by the morbid biped, it is to 
be regarded and incorporated as indispensable to a 
place consecrated to the restoration of health. To 
neglect it altogether, or to treat it with indiffer- 
ence, or to wait until it is called for before it is pro- 
vided, is not only to do this business as no other 
business is done, but to disregard the teachings of 
history and the example of the whole world. 

It is said the American would not support min- 
eral-water establishments on the scale of those at 
foreign spas. The answer is that they patronize 
them wherever they find them, and one reason why 
they make so much of them and pay so much for 
them abroad, is because they do not get the oppor- 
tunity at home. The baths are especially popular. 
The Cur-guest from every land revels in the bath 
like a porpoise in the sea. 

Will it pay ? is a question never answered until 
we can answer the question, Has it paid I The de- 
mand seldom conies before the supply, and if there 
is an exception to the rule, it is the human animal's 
search for remedial beverages and curative ablution. 
If it generally pays to create a demand for unneces- 
sary things by supplying them, it certainly ought to 
pay to meet a demand which is the clamor of those 
in torment for release from their pain, and of the 



158 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

dying for an arrest of the malady that is killing 
them. 

The instinct that provided these baths came of 
the instinct that demanded them. The disordered 
genus homo was found to be amphibious in his 
remedial inclinations, and it was found that it 
would pay to provide for their gratification. No 
sooner thought than done. That is the history of 
the Bath Treatment, of the Mineral-Water Treat- 
ment, and of every treatment, and of all kinds of 
business designed to make money out of the freaks 
and whrms, the oddities and necessities, of the hu- 
man family. 

Again it is said, by way of excusing our poor 
show of capital and public spirit in the Mineral- 
Water Treatment, that the foreign springs and baths 
are under Government control, while ours are de- 
pendent upon private enterprise. The answer is 
not American. We argue that private enterprise is 
bolder and wiser and in every way better for the 
public than Government patronage or the support 
of the State. Europe is dull, slow, behind the 
times, and an old fogy. America is smart, fast, up 
with the times, and young-manny. It will not do 
to use this argument to prove the superiority of our 
hotel system, and repudiate it to account for our in- 
feriority in hydropathic zeal. If private enterprise 
is sagacious, it will not fail where sagacity is so 
much needed, and so easy of attainment, and al- 
ways pays so well, as in dealing with the infirmities 



THE MINERAL-WATER, TREATMENT. 



159 



of the morbid vertebrate, with as many millions 
in bank as lie has ills in his flesh. 

It will not do for Saratoga to sneer at the walks 
between drinks, or neglect the zwieback, or poo-poo 
the shampoo, or to treat the Mineral- Water Remedy 
with indifference while it is drawing every year 
half a million of people who pay their board-bill 
in cash, and an immense number of them carrying 
their cash from this country at that. 

Should Saratoga be excelled by Carlsbad in die 
tetic enterprise or by the Turks in bath-tubs i 







THE SARATOGA TREATMENT. 

The Carlsbad Treatment is a Mineral Water 
Treatment exclusively ; the Saratoga Treatment is a 
Climate Treatment as well as a Mineral- Water Treat- 
ment, and when these two departments are as well 
known and as well united as they ought to be and 
will be, no health resort in the world will compare 
with Saratoga in " therapeutic conditions" or in 
the number of those; who avail themselves of them. 

Old as it is, and famous as it is, and popular as 
its waters, and hotels, and boarding-houses are, Sar- 
atoga Springs as the place for those who are seek- 
ing a permanent home in a curative climate is com- 
paratively unknown. The statement may surprise 
some, but it is made after a careful and prolonged 
investigation. Of the multitudes who know of 
and think of Saratoga as a fashionable resort for the 
month of August, very few know anything of its 
advantages as a harbor to anchor in or a recruiting 
station for the faculties that have been jaded or 
broken in the struggle for existence. Saratoga as 
a Climate Treatment it is our duty to proclaim. 

A fashionable resort it certainly is, and ought to 
be, and will undoubtedly continue to be so long as 
its livery and boarding-houses are the best in the 



102 



SAKATOGA CHIPS. 



world and so long as its hotels continue to surpass 
all others in combining all the luxuries of a palace 
with all the comforts of a home. Even the hotels, 
with all their luxury and splendor, have a civilized 
regard for the laws of dietetics, for they eat dinner 
in the middle of the day. 

Saratoga as a health resort or a Climate Treat- 
ment has never been advertised or boomed, and, 

of course, for 
good and suffi- 
cien t reasons. 
W h e n it is 
everybody's 
business to ad- 
vertise only his 
own interests, it 
is nobody's busi- 
ness to advertise 
the interests of 
the whole. This 
is unavoidable, 
and no one is 
to blame for it. This leaves the place, however, 
with its incomparable advantages and opportuni- 
ties for an all-the-y ear-round home, down on a 
par and level with places where nothing can sur- 
vive, except a crocodile or a seal, for two thirds of 
the year. If one half the money that has been ex- 
pended in advertising hair tonics for bald heads 
and whiskey "bitters" for the blood had been 




RESIDENCE OF GEN. W. B. FRENCH. 



THE SARATOGA TREATMENT. 163 

spent in proclaiming the tonical efficacy of the Sar- 
atoga climate, Union Avenue would have been built 
to its eastern boundary and the whole plateau 
would now be covered with the comfortable homes 
of those who are languishing with malarial fever 
or have died of consumption, without so much as 
hearing of, to say nothing of seeing, this land of 
brooks of water. 

Saratoga as pre-eminently the location and the 
clime for a permanent and sanitary residence is 1o 
this moment a matter of individual discovery rather 
than of general knowledge. To the most of those 
of us who have arrived at last in Saratoga, after lon^ 
search and much lost time and health, it was as acci- 
dental and incidental a discovery as that of the 
silver mines of Mexico by the hunter who pulled 
up a bush by the roots in tumbling over the rocks. 
To multitudes who would now gladly avail them- 
selves of its recuperative air, if they knew of it, it is 
as unknown as are the sources of the Nile to those 
who live upon its banks. Those who are now need- 
ing it will have to discover it for themselves one by 
one, unless, indeed, they read and believe what I say 
here, and act upon their confidence in my testimony 
— the testimony of one who speaks from experience 
as full of gladness in the end as it was of sadness 
in the beginning. This testimony, however, is not 
disinterested. It comes of gratitude to Saratoga for 
its climate, and waters, and of a meek and lowly 
interest in its real estate. Disinterested motives are 



164 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

impossible, and interested motives are not wicked, 
and all motives are mixed. 

My case is one of an innumerable number. I 
too was a discoverer, so far as my health was con- 
cerned, like Charles IY. or Sir "William Johnson. 

When the time came to flee or to break, with all 
that that imports, death being the least of what it 
imports, I reconnoitred the neighborhood of New 
York and Philadelphia, the Catskills, the Berkshire 
hills, the glorious Adirondack forests, the Hudson, 
the sea-side, and the suburban villages. I consulted 
the b£st authorities on climate, and, after two 
years lost in this investigation and consultation, I 
took the advice of Dr. Justin R. Loomis, of New 
York, who made a remark which doubtless he has 
forgotten, but which I never can forget, for never 
was wisdom better justified of her words, or words 
of prophecy more accurately fulfilled. 

After running over with me the names of a mul- 
titude of places in New York. New England, and 
New Jersey, he said, " If you want a place to live 
in for all or most of the year Saratoga is by all 
odds the place for you and your wife. They have 
a sandy Plateau there, which is a spot of nature's 
own making for people who need pure air, natural 
drainage, sunshine, and freedom from malaria. A 
place more free from malaria and the causes of 
malaria I could not name." 

I do not profess to give the precise words of 
Professor Loomis, but the substance and meaning 



THE SARATOGA TREATMENT. 165 

of them are in the words I have set down here, as 
the testimony of one who is abundantly qualified as 
a witness and the testimony of the one who acted 
upon his advice, and who repeats it with emphasis 
to every one he can reach who is breaking' with in- 
cipient consumption, or nervous prostration, or any 
diseases or disorders that come of overwork or 
over-worry. 

Lying off toward the sunrising is the Saratoga 
Plateau which has just been alluded to. It is 
about a mile and a half wide and about two miles 
long, and is pronounced by experts in soil and 
climate to be the very spot for the human animal 
to live on and thrive on in winter and in summer, 
in spring and autumn. 

The sand for consumptives, asthmatics, rheu- 
matics, and malariatics— sand, and sunshine, and 
showers, cool nights in summer and steady cold and 
good sleighing in winter. That is the Saratoga 
Plateau, which of all spots on this planet is designed 
of nature to " cleanse the foul body of the infected 
world." It is well up out of everything clammy 
and well away from everything vile. It is clean. 
It abounds in the best water to be found in the 
bowels of the earth. It is beautiful for situation. 
It commands the Adirondacks and the hills of the 
Hudson, the Green Mountains of Vermont, and 
the world-renowmed hotels in the valley of the 
springs. 

The drainage is quick and easy. The sand is 



166 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

about nine thousand feet deep — deep enough for a 
cellar which will always be dry and warm. 

The Saratoga Plateau reminds us of what is 
called " the King's Summit" in the highlands of 
Ceylon. That also is an elevated plateau, whither 
the lowlanders of the island flee to escape the tropi- 
cal vermin and diseases, just as our esteemed coun- 
trymen of the Southern States and the Ohio River 
are beginning to flee to Saratoga, to escape the 
miasma that envelops them all the year round, for 
the want of a sharp winter to cut it out and drive 
it off. 

But even on the top of the King's Summit the 
atmosphere is debilitating. It is seldom colder 
than our May and often hotter than our August. 

Nor is it free from the terrible monsoon that 
hangs over the plains and shakes the mountains with 
a thunder-storm snch as never terrified an inhabitant 
of the temperate zone. 

Furthermore, " the King's Snmmit," like all the 
rest of the professional climates, may as well be in 
the planet Mercury, for all the attractions it has for 
the wretched invalid, who would rather die of con- 
sumption in Boston than of homesickness in 
Ceylon. 

The Saratoga Plateau may not be as high in the 
air as the King's Summit, but, on the other hand, 
it is not so far from the entertaining metropolis of 
the New World, or illustrious Ithaca, where Ulysses 
was born, or prosperous Troy, which could only be 



THE SARATOGA TREATMENT. 167 

conquered by the classical cavalry of the wooden 
horse. 

Saratoga is geographically well situated for a 
sanitary residence. It is easy of access to the neu- 
ralgic and gastralgic, just as Peruvian bark is found 
close to a region given over to intermittent fevers ; 
and kousso, the tape-worm remedy, abounds near 
where that disease is prevalent. 

No kousso will cure the tape- worm of Wall 
Street, however. Only a life of quietness and 
sanity at Saratoga will stop the gnawing avarice of 
that rather tough worm on your little inside. 

It costs little to get here, and not much to live 
here, and everybody else is near by. You may be 
in the world and out of it. The world will come 
to you, and get board with you, and you may even 
get bored with it. 

You may start for New York when you go to 
bed, and be in New York when you arise, and but- 
ton-hole your member at Washington for an office 
before the sun sets on your scheme. 

The invalid vertebrate may find temporary relief 
in places where he dare not remain, as, for exam- 
ple, at the North Pole or on the Bahama Islands. 
They are too cold or too warm, too windy or too 
watery, or too far from society. Florida will do for 
spring, and the White Mountains for summer, and 
the top of St. Bernard for an hour and a half in mid- 
summer, but the Cur-guest without a fortune cannot 
invest in real estate on the mountain or the ocean, 



168 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

and even if lie has inherited the coupons, he cannot 
make a permanent home of his investment by the 
sea. 

On the contrary, every one of the fifty thousand 
who mounts the departing train at Saratoga may 
have a different reason for going, bat no one can 
give the climate as that reason. If he should, he 
would have to give the same reason for leaving the 
planet, which, indeed, may well be done. Perhaps 
this round globe, small or large, as you please, is 
not perfect in climate, and was not intended to be, 
#nd, perhaps, the conditions of human life with 
which it furnishes its inhabitants are by no means 
all they should be. What we maintain is that, con- 
sidering the planet upon which we are obliged to 
revolve, from no fault or option of our own, the 
climate of Saratoga Springs is for living in the year 
round unequalled, and this we say with so little 
malice for any and so much charity for all, that we 
advise them all to do as we did — my lady of Foot- 
hold and I — try it. 

What fact could be more conclusive for the Sara- 
toga climate and its eastern Plateau of clean sand 
than the fact that only one per cent of its inhab- 
itants die of consumption, while fifteen per cent of 
the population die of consumption in the State at 
large and twenty per cent in the city of New 
York ? 

The Saratoga Treatment is for all periods of time. 
You need not feel obliged to leave off drinking its 



THE SARATOGA TREATMENT. 169 

water just when it is beginning to benefit yon, or 
to cease breathing its air just as its invigorating 
effect is beginning to tell upon your dilapidated con- 
stitution, or return to the brawn-consuming sun of 
the sunny South just when you are collecting col- 
lops of fat on your flanks. 

Instead of three weeks at Carlsbad, three years 
at Saratoga ; instead of popping in and out at 
Schlangenbad or Nice, a repose in the bosom of 
your family, while the Treatment transforms the 
liver and transfigures the complexion. 

Some need one year, some two years, some five, 
some half a lifetime, some a whole lifetime of the 
Saratoga Treatment. You combine being at home 
with getting well. 

It is noteworthy that those who leave Saratoga for 
their old home or a new one almost invariably return. 
They miss the Saratoga Treatment. However in- 
different they may have been to it while under- 
going it, their system rebels against being deprived 
of it. All the more will they be awakened to a 
consciousness of its efficacy if they have been 
hitherto unconscious of its existence. The benefi- 
cence of the air of Saratoga is shown in the craving 
for it. The new-comers speak of a desire to be out-of- 
doors that they never felt anywhere else. The out- 
door air is so invigorating that the in-door air is 
correspondingly enervating — not that the latter is 
any worse than any other air of house or office, but 
that the former is so much better than that of the 



170 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

continent generally. This is attributable to the 
remedial and renovating influence of the Climate 
Treatment when not counteracted by the furnace 
or the sewer. Ladies speak of getting rid of their 
sense of weariness and exhaustion by a walk or 
ride to an extent they never knew before. Sara- 
toga beguiles you out of doors, and that is the 
open-air annex of the Saratoga Treatment. 

The reason why the Greeks had such pretty noses 
and large brains is because they slept on their 
roofs in the open air, and walked up Mount Mac- 
Gregor, and looked out upon the valley of the Hud- 
son, and the Green Mountains, and our beautiful 
suburbs of Glens Falls, Schuylerville, and Mont- 
pelier. 

Mount MacGregor, with its comfortable hostelry, 
its Drexel cottage, where the great soldier fell in his 
last battle, and its magnificent panorama — Mount 
MacGregor will do for the happy bride and groom 
what Mount Ida did for Zeus and Hera, " . throw 
up her freshest herbs, while o'er them a bright 
golden cloud shall gather, and shed its drops of 
glistening dew." 

As Saratoga Springs is incomplete without Mount 
MacGregor, so the Saratoga Treatment will never 
do its perfect work if it does not comprise an in- 
timate acquaintance with the nooks and glens, 
strolls and scenes, of this charming mountain. 
Saratoga will alleviate the hay-fever, but Mount 
MacGregor will cure it. 



THE SARATOGA TREATMENT. 173 

This peculiarly invigorating effect of the Sara- 
toga atmosphere has been attributed to the mineral 
springs and the Adirondack Mountains. Certainly 
the climate has some of the peculiarities of a moun- 
tain region, and there is a snap and substance in its 
air that may well suggest the influence of the ocean 
as it bubbles up in a score of places, to add its saline 
zest to the waves of invigorating atmosphere that 
come down from the Kayaderosseras range. Let 
the theory be, then, that the Saratoga climate is a 
combination — unknown elsewhere — of salt air from 
the sea by way of the springs and mountain air 
from the Adirondacks. 

It is a climate with a wonderful average. It has 
its fits, and starts, and fluctuations, but compare it 
with any other, and it will average more satis- 
factory days and nights, noons, and morns, and 
evenings, than any other that we have found, my 
lady and 1, in our wanderings over the States at 
home or the lands abroad. 

There are more pleasant days in the three hun- 
dred and sixty-five at Saratoga than anywhere else, 
and I have been almost everywhere else. I have 
known three hundred of them to be pleasant. The 
remaining sixty-five bring the rains, but for which 
the wells and the cows would go dry. They include 
the uncomfortably hot days, but if it were not for 
these the peaches of New Jersey would not ripen, 
and the cheese of western New York would fail, 



174 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

and the flocks would be cut off from the stalls in 
Pennsylvania. 

The days of the mornings below zero are in those 
sixty- five, but if they failed us, the malaria brought 
here by the ever- welcome Cur-guest would survive 
the winter and spread in the spring. So much has 
this cosmopolitan humanitarium to do in the way of 
restoring the malarious and setting up the broken- 
down, that it would have to succumb to the maladies 
it cures but for the Winter Cure, which it applies 
.to itself as well as practises upon its visitors. 

With more visitors than any other Spa under the 
sun, Saratoga has never been visited by an epidemic, 
a cyclone, a water-spout, or an earthquake, although 
it has felt and I have felt the vibrations of the one 
intended to admonish the politicians of Washing- 
ton and the Government of New York. 

In 1832 the cholera that scourged Montreal, Al- 
bany, Plattsburg, Burlington, Whitehall, and the 
towns of the Hudson left Saratoga untouched. 
Never was the village more healthful or beautiful 
than it was during that awful summer. This not 
because the wicked are so few or their " jobs" so 
modest, but because there are so many enduring 
tax-payers here waiting patiently for a seasonable op- 
portunity, which is absolutely sure to come. 

The exemption of Saratoga from the cholera was 
doubtless owing to that peculiar ingredient of its 
atmosphere, which gives it its pre-eminence as a cli- 
mate, ozone, which is a kind of electrified oxygen. 



THE SARATOGA TREATMENT. 177 

A great deficiency in ozone has been noted and re- 
ported at places where the cholera was most destruc- 
tive. The ozone of the Saratoga air is a preventive 
as well as a restorative. Here you may inhale the 
ounce of prevention in the air, as well as imbibe the 
pound of cure in chloride of sodium. 

By the way, does the incipient consumptive 
know how to breathe ? Does she know the art of 
inhaling this bracing and toning ozone ? Does she 
breathe with the bottom as well as the top of her 
lungs, which are perishing for lack of use and ex- 
ercise ? Consumption has been stopped and the 
lungs restored to absolute health and soundness 
by first having the air of the Saratoga Plateau to 
breathe, and then learning how to fill, and expand, 
and exercise every portion of the lungs with it. The 
art of breathing is the secret of living with many 
a person with an inherited tendency to consumption. 

Ask your physician for a lesson in breathing. It 
may save your life. 

The Saratoga Treatment then consists, first of all 
and most of all, in having a home and being at 
home at Saratoga. In accordance with that theory, 
it has entered upon a new era in home-life. It is a 
home boom. The new houses are not simply cot- 
tages, a cross between a tree and a tent, designed 
only to keep off the sun at noon and the rain at 
night — they are homes. They are built for all 
the year round, and they will sooner or later be oc- 
cupied all the year round. 



178 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

Not only does the Saratoga Treatment excel that 
of all other mineral- water resorts in having a Win- 
ter Cnre attachment and enabling the Cur-guest to 
get well at home, it makes that home a paying 
investment. While recuperating his kidneys he 
replenishes his purse. 

Besides the advantages of climate, location, and re- 
fined society, he has the opportunity of making 
money out of his house and lot investment. It 
is salable and rentable, or it enables its owner to 
utilize the summer boarder or the jolly tobogganer. 

If you prefer not to feed him, you can room him, 
and turn him out to browse on your neighbor's 
pasture. An income in hard cash of from two 
hundred dollars to one thousand dollars per annum 
for rooms alone is not to be sneezed at or sneered 
at by those who wish to live without embarrass- 
ment and die out of debt. In no other place 
where the human carnivora congregate for health, 
rest, or recreation are there so many of the most 
deserving people in the world getting a good living 
or making a fortune out of a house and lot, where 
there is not enough of the lot to raise a hill of beans 
or a sitting of chickens. 

So that the Saratoga Treatment falls in with the 
fact that the chief end of living is to live in a home 
of your own. It enables you to keep up an identi- 
ty in your own estimation and an individuality in 
the estimation of your fellows. It confers a sense 
of being somebody upon the veriest nobody. A 



THE SARATOGA TREATMENT. 



179 



workingman who owns the roof over him and the 
mattress under him feels superior to the dude in 
kids who boards. 

If you can afford it, build yourself a palace on 
the beautiful North Broadway, of course ; but if 
your bank account is inadequate for that, you will 
not have far to go toward the west, the south, or 
the east before finding a desirable spot for this 
home of your own, which constitutes so important 
a factor in The Saratoga Treatment. 




A CRACK SHOT. 



FLYING CHIPS. 




This year eighteen hundred and eighty- 
seven is clearly the centen- 
nial year of Saratoga Springs. 
In 1787 the copper- 
colored may be said 
to have faded into 
the pale-faced 
American. The Al- 
gonquin with his bow and arrow gave way to the 
Anglo-Saxon with his ramrod and mutton-chop 
whiskers. 

That was the year of the first cottage, the first 
hotel, and the first Cur-guest — according to our in- 
dustrious village historian, N. B. Sylvester. The 
name Saratoga seems to have settled into its present 
spelling and euphony and fastened itself upon the 
springs in 1772. 

This first hotel, the nebula out of which has been 
evolved the present constellation of hostelries, was 
kept, and kept " clean," and kept open all the year 
round, and its proprietor, Alexander Bryan, is de- 
servedly rewarded with an epitaph in Greenridge, 
which is not all epitaphy. He was the first Cur- 



182 



SARATOGA CHIPS. 



guest at Saratoga and the first illustration of what 
its waters and its winters can do to promote health 
and prolong life, for he lived on snow-shoes and 
chloride of sodium to the good old age of ninety- 
two. 

It is plain, therefore, that the year 1887 is the 
year for a centennial celebration at Saratoga Springs, 
especially as it closes with the Saratoga of the Phil- 
istines and opens 
with the Saratoga 
of the Children of 
Light. 

Of course, as 
would be expect- 
ed, the Sarato- 
gas are divided 
into Philistines 
and the Children 



of Light. 

The Philistines 
have so long prevailed at Saratoga Springs that they 
have nearly extirpated its esprit de corps, which 
the Children of Light are now striving valiantly to 
revive and utilize. 

The Philistines have been slack in possessing the 
land, but now the Children of Light are rapidly 
making North Broadway an avenue of palaces and 
covering the eastern Plateau with the beautiful 
homes of an intelligent and public-spirited people. 




RESIDENCE OE 3. P. GILSON, ESQ. 



FLYING CHIPS. 183 

The Philistines do not like to be disturbed in the 
enjoyment of the trance that they share with the 
frogs. The frogs, however, are up and croaking 
for eight months of the year, and are silent for the 
remaining four, while the Philistines lie down, curl 
up, and croak for the whole year round. They are 
in a perpetual state of objection. They demur at 
the expense and the commotion that attend public 
enterprise. They are startled out of their slumber 
in broad day by the shrieks of the merry sleighers. 
They prefer the old, long funereal silence that 
reigned over Union Avenue and still reigns over 
Greenridge. They even prefer the old prices of 
real estate, which would not sell even at those prices. 

The Philistines' inertia is easily explained. It is 
the natural and useful conservatism that counter- 
acts by one extreme the perils of another. So that 
charity for the Saratoga Philistine, with his vexa- 
tious partiality for the good old times of Rip Van 
Dam, suffereth long and is kind. 

He will awake one of these days, and fall in and 
keep step, and endure patiently the melody of the 
band and the melodious noises of the boys, and 
even pay for keeping the streets sprinkled and the 
snow smooth, when he finds that the march across 
the Plateau enhances the value of his house and lot 
and brings customers to his store. 

Strikes and rumors of strikes, dull markets, and 
slow blood in the veins of trade have no effect 



184 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

upon Saratoga. Capital here replies to all menaces, 
" Then I won't build," and labor knows that 
nothing is to be gained here by refusing to build 
houses, because nothing is to be gained here unless 
houses are built and hotels run. Furthermore, if 
every workingman in town should leave town, his 
place would be filled before he got to the next 
town. It is the natural home of both capital and 
labor. Both thrive, and neither can afford to bull- 
doze the other. Saratoga is secure. 

Speaking of the aqueous freaks of nature, a friend 
from Texas tells me, as we enjoy the Saratoga sum- 
mer evening on the piazza, of an eruption of water 
at San Marco, that is as curious and mysterious in 
its origin as any of our mineral springs. It is the 
San Marco River, which comes up bang right out of 
the ground without saying, " By your leave" to 
any other river or to any natural law which gov- 
erns the entrance or exit of terrestrial streams. 
There is no more sign of water above its source 
than there is in the Barcan Desert, and it springs 
from the bosom of the solid earth a navigable water- 
course, clear as crystal, limestone in nature, in 
some places thirty feet deep, with vegetation at its 
bottom that resembles coral, and thus flows on until 
it empties into the Gulf of Mexico. It is admirably 
adapted to mill purposes, and hence an invaluable 
acquisition to the enterprising San Marcons. Pro- 
fessor Gray, of Harvard, who made the river a 



FLYING CHIPS. 185 

visit, said it was impossible to solve the enigma of 
its origin, but suggested that it might originate in 
the melting snows that sank into the ground at the 
feet of the Eockies, forming a subterranean stream 
that breaks through to the surface at San Marco. 

Saratoga is remarkable for the number and variety 
of its organizations, designed to keep its residents 
and visitors supplied with social enjoyments, edu- 
cational facilities, and eleemosynary opportunities. 

There are ten churches, which, with the organi- 
zations inside of them and outside of them, make 
seventy-seven organizations in all of a religious or 
reformatory character. 

Adding to these the lodges, orders, and the liter- 
ary, social, military, scientific, and winter sport 
associations, and the Saratogan, native, foreign, and 
occasional, may be said to have the opportunity of 
contributing to the support of one hundred and fif- 
teen organized endeavors to promote his highest in- 
terests. 

There are eight Public Schools, including one of 
the most efficient and satisfactory High Schools in 
the State, and five private schools, including St. 
Clement's College, recently established. 

Saratoga would be the place of all places for a 
Hospital for Curables. 

The Children of Light at Saratoga have laid the 
foundations of a temple to the goddess Athene, and 



18G SARATOGA CHIPS. 

it cannot be long before the Philistines will join in 
the acclamations that announce the completion of 
the Saratoga Athenaeum. 

The reading-rooms, public libraries, and museums 
of the foreign resorts rival their colonnades and 
bath-tubs in splendor and convenience. Herein, 
again, Carlsbad has antiquity and the majority on 
its side. The tony Greeks and the sturdy Romans 
provided nutriment for the mind as well as crutches 
for the £ont. Athens had its Athenaeum as well 
as. its sanitarium. The Cur-guests divided their 
devotions between Hygeia and Athene. In Greece 
no bank account or interior decorations would com- 
pensate for ignorance of books and art. 

A health resort is at a statistical disadvantage. 
Its vital statistics contain those who come there to 
die. Those who come there for health bring no 
health with them, and must be supplied with it by 
the health resort. This is embarrassing as well as 
exhausting to the health resort. It is not credited 
with those whom it brings to life, and is discredited 
with those who die on its hands. 

A reason given for the Village form of govern- 
ment for Saratoga Springs is that its visitors are 
attracted by the simplicity and rusticity of the word 
Village. 

This is worthy of Miss Mercy Pecksniff, who sat 
upon a stool not by reason of the shortness of her 



FLYING CHIPS. 18? 

legs, but because she was all girlish ness and kitten- 
ish buoyancy. 

Saratoga Springs is the only community whose 
population ranges from twelve to fifty thousand 
that governs itself by means of trustees, from sheer 
girlishness and kittenish buoyancy ! 

Saratoga has been injured by the land leech. A 
foot-note to page 159 of Mr. Stone's interesting 
" Reminiscences of Saratoga" reads, " Joseph 
Bonaparte, failing to buy in Saratoga, afterward 
bought a beautiful place at Bordentown, N. J., on 
the Delaware River." This is more than a foot- 
note ; it is only too felicitous a heading for an un- 
welcome chapter in the history of Saratoga real 
estate. There should be a special and extra tax for 
the land leech. Land that is so valuable that it 
cannot be purchased should be taxed according to 
its owner's valuation. 

An occasional fast horse creates a street full of 
fast drivers, and then the brute is invariably at the 
butt end of the whip. 

A horse that in any other corporation of civiliza- 
tion, or even barbarism, would be allowed to go the 
speed that keeps his gait, at Saratoga Springs is pro- 
voked, harassed, and lashed into such confusion of 
head and embarrassment of legs that he has a gait 
for every leg. He paces with one, racks with an- 
other, shackles with another, gallops with a fourth, 



188 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

and waltzes with all four. There are well-dressed 
people who drive on Union Avenue, who really 
seem to believe that a horse is going rapidly if he 
is only wriggling tremendously at the tail, sweating 
copiously at every pore, and has a different gait for 
every leg. 

There are more gaits known to the horse at Sara- 
toga Springs than at any other place on the face of 
the earth. 

Then the airs and attitudes of the gentleman who 
is trying to make you believe, and, perhaps, really be- 
lieves, that he is driving a fast horse, instead of his 
horse being driven by a fast man. How he leans 
back, how he holds hard on the lines (apparently), 
how intently he looks upon his horse, and what 
solicitude there is in his tones as he endeavors to 
soothe the furious beast, which is going at the rate 
of seventeen miles an hour, and would stop dead 
still if he were not afraid of the whip ! Pecksniff's 
horse he is, all action and no go, and makes up in 
motion what he lacks in locomotion. 

The livery drivers are noticeably careful of the 
faithful creatures under their lines, but the livery 
hirers, the tradesman's kid, and the lad on the ten- 
cent express ought not to be run away with, if there 
is any danger of breaking the horse's neck. 

It is sometimes said, "¥e would like to visit 
Saratoga, but cannot afford it ; the price of living is 



FLYING CHIPS. 189 

too high, and there is too much exaction in the 
way of dress and show.'' 

There never was a complaint more destitute of 
reason or more out of keeping with the facts. 
While it is true, and ought to be true, that the 
Saratoga hotels and residences draw the wealthiest 
and most fashionable people in the world, it is, 
ought to be, and always will be equally true that 
there is no watering-place or place for living the 
year round where the resident or visitor, the 
workingman or the literary man, can live on less 
income than he can at Saratoga Springs. 

Nor is it true that you cannot secure a comfort- 
able home here unless you own a Western State or 
an Eastern Board of Aldermen. You can buy a 
house and lot, or you can buy a lot and build a 
house, in this wonderful climate and in the vicinity 
of these marvellous fountains of curing waters, for 
just as reasonable an amount of money as you can 
in places where there is no winter to expel the 
malaria of the poisonous summer from your 
blood. 

It is the glory of Saratoga Springs that ladies may 
walk its streets by daylight and gaslight unattended 
and unmolested. This is creditable to our civili- 
zation, which will never be what it should be until 
a woman may walk its streets by night or day with- 
out risk of injury or insult. And the men who 



190 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

permit the insult are as cowardly as the villains who 
inflict it. 

The ancients had as few diseases as they had doc- 
tors, and when they came they (the diseases, of 
course) were accepted with resignation as punish- 
ment from the gods, and were to be got rid of by 
such sacrifices as would be likely to appease the dis- 
pleasure of the offended deities. 

The number of those who in this country resort 
to mineral water exclusively as a remedy are grad- 
ually increasing. Some of them know no other 
than Hunyadi Janos water, and whoever has found 
relief from it will kiss the bottle in grateful rapture 
every time thereafter that he pours out a dose. 
Some have no other remedy for biliousness, and in- 
digestion, and a sour temper. As it is not an 
agreeable beverage, it is not likely to become a con- 
stant one ; nevertheless, its efficacy is so marked, 
quick, and satisfactory in certain cases, that the in- 
toxicated Cur-guest is apt to resort to it too fre- 
quently. 

Proud flesh finds a remedy in mineral waters, 
especially in those of Barreges, and are therefore re- 
sorted to by those Americans of the United States 
whose flesh has suddenly broken out with this dis- 
ease, from no fault of their ancestors, who were poor 
but honest, and were in no danger of the malady, 



FLYING CHIPS. 191 

because they were destitute of the money that 
brings it on. 

As acridity of temper comes of acidity at the 
stomach, the mineral water which cures the latter 
will remove the former. Indeed, it could have no 
better testimony than such a result as this. 

But do not expect any water to cure you of your 
sins. You may need the Hyssop Cure. The famous 
Bruce escaped from the bloodhounds by swimming 
the river. The noses of the dogs could not track 
him through the water. But no water, however 
impregnated with chlorides, or alkalies, or any other 
lies, can baffle the Xemesis that shadows you for 
defrauding the tax-payers or deceiving a woman. 
Alas ! that he can follow the trail through the cren- 
erations of those who would gladly get rid of it if 
they could, and deserve to get rid of it. 

The nearest I can come to a goddess of mineral 
springs is Yorvonna, who, we are told, was venerated 
by the Gauls for presiding over their baths, prob- 
ably because she prohibited gratuities and insisted 
upon wages. 

A votive tablet may be seen at Bourbonne-les- 
Bains, inscribed by C. Gatinius to the goddess 
Yorvonna, for the cure of his daughter Cocilla. 

Sewer gas seems to be synonymous with malaria, 



192 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

and the two may be similar in nature and equal in 
malignancy, but they may have a different ori- 
gin. 

Your well water, or your stagnant pond, or your 
low river bottom, or the sluggish streams in the 
rock under your house in New York may breed the 
malarious fever that slowly saps your energies and 
poisons your blood, but there is only one definition 
of the fatal sewer gas, and that is gas generated by 
a sewer. No sewer, no sewer gas ; no sewer gas, no 
malarial mortality from that source. That closes 
the discussion of that question, and opens the ques- 
tion whether bad plumbing should not be classed 
with bad murder, and be made punishable with the 
same remedy. The plumbers have more power 
over life and death than the cowboys or the Sioux. 
If you must live over a rock, be sure that you are 
well informed about its pools and streams. Where 
ignorance is fatal it is wise to be enlightened. 

No chlorides, or iodides, or cures of any sort, no 
Saratoga climate or Carlsbad Treatment, will prevail 
against the pestilential effect of a wet cellar or of a 
defective or inadequate or unwisely located sewer. 
Here is where the penny- wise and pound -foolish 
policy is not simply foolish, but criminal. 

The tax-payer cannot afford to save his taxes at 
the expense of his real estate. Better drain the 
treasury and incur a debt to secure a perfect system 
of sewage than to pave streets and build homes 
over pipes that poison the air and destroy life. 



FLYING CHIPS. 193 

It is said that a caravan of camels will walk around 
a broomstick and that a herd of elephants can be 
turned back by a fence-rail on the ground. 

Whether this is true or not it certainly is true 
that " a license to be drunk on the premises" will, 
if located with adequate recklessness, bring the 
march of civilization to a dead stop. For the mis- 
chief that it does to property, the property owner 
should easily win a suit for damages. 

Nothing should be more self-evident, then, one 
would think, to the average Saratogan than that his 
bread and butter depends upon the state and con- 
dition of the real estate market, whether he has an 
owner's interest in it or not. Furthermore, he 
should see that whatever in any way injures this 
market is a calamity, and whatever nourishes and 
promotes this market is a blessing to a place which 
is, as no other place is, the favorite of nature and 
the future. 

High prices at Saratoga are as necessary as low 
ones, since some are just as much disappointed in 
not being charged five dollars a day as others are in 
being charged more than one dollar a day. To 
charge them less would deprive them of their self- 
respect and us of their money, and the one is indis- 
pensable to their happiness and the other to ours. 

Five dollars a day is just as indispen sable as five 
dollars a week. 



194 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

Saratoga, while it provides amply for the tastes 
and wants of the rich, is ingenious and generous 
without example in its opportunities for those who 
have not a fortune to spend in trying to save their 
lives and get a little pleasure out of life. 

You can see any day, as you stroll along under the 
elms of Saratoga, how Gothic architecture was sug- 
gested to Gothic architects. 

The branches of the elms reach over, and touch, 
and form the Gothic roof, while the trunks of the 
trees on either side create a vista of stalwart col- 
umns, all combining to make the street resemble 
the aisle of a vast cathedral. There are some very 
striking tree views in the streets of Saratoga. 

All the moralists, and satirists, and professors 
of hygienics take sides against us and themselves, 
too, in this marvellously plucky fight of man with 
his environment. They never seem to reflect when 
they upbraid us for. being so fast that we are 
slow, considering the fact that we are riding through 
space on the back of a meteor. When they chide 
us for our nervousness, they forget that we make 
an annual and a diurnal trip very well calculated to 
agitate the nerve centres, as well as the commercial 
centres. We might feel somewhat hysterical if 
we were going round the sun astraddle of Maud S. 
What, then, must be the hysteria engendered by a 
speed of one thousand miles a minute, and in the 



FLYING CHIPS. 



195 



meanwhile whirling on our axis fast enough to take 
away the breath of a tumbler pigeon. 

Does it never occur to our censors that the head- 
ache which they charge to our negligence may be 
attributable to this ride on the meteor ? May not 
the biliousness come of the meteors passing through 
a bilious spot of the atmospheric universe \ 

Yes, man is making a plucky fight of it, and 
" we will fight in the shade if the arrows of the 
barbarians darken the sun." 




THE SARATOGA GAYETY CURE. 

It is the large and sagacious object of these Chips 
to get Saratoga Springs looked at from all the 
points of view from which it can be seen to advan- 
tage — to get it intelligently and fully compre- 
hended. This will be as apparent as it will be in- 
structive to all who read all that is set down in 
these pages. Saratoga is many-sided. It has many 
ends to gain. It has a multifarious mission. It is 
the world's Cosmopolitan Spa. 

Those who do not look upon Saratoga Springs as 
the world's Cosmopolitan Spa, those who do not re- 
gard it as a place for everybody as distinguished 
from anybody, will criticise it unfairly and com- 
plain of it unjustly. They will see it through the 
refracting medium of their own prejudices, which, 
however sincere, may be very short-sighted. 

It is complained, for example, that Saratoga 
Springs "is a place of gayety, where the waters 
may be drank or let alone, according to one's 
fancy," and that some regard " the drinking of the 
mineral water in the light of a joke." 

Then, Saratoga is the very place for those who 
need the Gayety Cure and do not need the Mineral- 
Water Treatment, and there are enough of these 



198 



SARATOGA CHIPS. 



born every year to keep that temple of refined fun, 
the United States Hotel, full all the year round. 
As it is, it would be just as grave a calamity for 
that hotel to close its doors against the votaries of 
happiness and fashion as it would be for those pop- 
ular homes for the Cur-guest kept by Drs. Strong, 
Grant, and Hamilton to be closed against the devo- 
tees of Hygeia. A hostelry of this rank and in- 
fluence cannot 
be maintained 
without bene- 
ficently affect- 
ing the cause 
of remedial 

gayety. 

A cosmopo- 
litan Spa can- 
not be exclu- 
sively a sani- 
or an insani- 
tarium. If 
Saratoga is an 
asylum, it is a sane asylum. It is not for the sick 
alone or for cranks to the exclusion, of the level- 
headed. It is for the well as well as the well-to-do 
and the wealthy. It is designed to preserve the 
health of the healthy and to perpetuate the happi- 
ness of those who are already happy, not less than 
to relieve the spendthrift of his cash and the acidu- 
lous of their bile. 




RESIDENCE OF HON. C. S. LESTER. 



THE SARATOGA GAYETY CURE. 201 

Saratoga is as much more than Carlsbad as 
America is than beautiful Bohemia, and it would 
be as undesirable to make Saratoga over into a 
Carlsbad as it would be to reconstruct Carlsbad into 
a Saratoga. One Carlsbad is enough, and more 
than one Saratoga Springs would be more than 
enough for so small a star as that on which we ride. 

The Mineral- Water Treatment should be estab- 
lished and proclaimed at Saratoga, as I have else- 
where insisted, but it should not be made compul- 
sory along with education and vaccination — need 
not be. The Saratoga Treatment may or may not 
include chloride of sodium, since those who need 
the climate may simply have the blues from too 
long confinement at the desk, while those who 
need the minerals may be depressed by an hered- 
itary enlargement of the abdomen. 

The Saratoga Gayety Cure is to be recommended 
to those dead-in-earnest countrymen of ours who 
meet here periodically to set the world to rights. 
It would counteract the intensity which gives them 
a lean and hungry look, and makes them think too 
much, and prevents their sleeping well at night. 
Such men are dangerous — to themselves ! Instead 
of brawn they have choler, instead of sweetness 
and light, a sour way of looking out upon the 
world, and instead of well-set hair, baldness. 

What terriers they are, these setters of the world 
to rights ! They have the thin nose of the black- 
and-tan and the glittering eye of the ferret. Their 



202 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

long experience and wonderful skill in hunting the 
rats out of education and society has got into their 
visage, gait, and gestures. Their eyes snap, their 
mouths drop open, their hats slip up from their 
foreheads, and their feet fly from under them as 
they walk, or rather as they hop, skip, and jump 
from one meeting to another and from committee 
to committee, and boast of being " so driven" that 
they have " no time to eat." They have time 
enough to eat, but not to chew. They bolt their 
food, and when it lodges in their guzzle they 
wash it down with iced water in gulps, a gobletful 
at a gulp. And yet they know, or ought to know, 
that no world as thickly settled as this one was ever 
set right while its digestive apparatus was out of 
repair and its intensity was so morbid that it could 
bite in two a tenpenny nail. 

He that putteth his trust in the Lord shall be 
made fat, he that putteth his trust in his logical 
acumen shall be made lean. He should fly to " the 
place for gayety," and try the Gayety Cure, and 
rather than have no fun, let him drink the waters 
for fun. If the waters prove inoffensive, perhaps 
the fun will be of service, or possibly the fun will 
be the very constituent of the dose that will make 
it efficacious. 

The Carlsbad Treatment is good for the American 
terrier, who is so given to hunting and shaking rats 
that he hunts them in his sleep and shakes them in 
his dreams. We should miss them, and should 



THE SARATOGA GAYETY CURE. 203 

long for their return, but Carlsbad would be good 
for them. Carlsbad does not profess to set the 
world to rights, and yet it does set the world to 
rights by repairing its digestive clock-work and 
clothing its reformers in their right minds. Carls- 
bad knows nothing of conventions, or resolutions, 
or discussions. It has no use for even a Whereas. 
It cannot be beguiled into a debate on temperance 
— simply takes it for granted — or a dispute over 
forms of government — simply insisting upon self- 
government. 

The intensity of the terrier finding no one to dis- 
pute his positions or question his panacea for setting 
the world to rights finally and quietly succumbs 
to the mild sceptre of the goddess Ilygeia, and 
feels his consuming earnestness saving place to a 
recruiting sense of acquiescence in the government 
of the universe. 

I was positively alarmed during my Treatment at 
Carlsbad lest this sudden reaction from the din and 
racket over the tariff and civil service reform 
should work injuriously upon my wearied eerehj- 
lum; but presently I began to feel the absence of 
the setters of the world to rights to be recupera- 
tive, and soon began to realize that as the world had 
got on without me before I came into it, the world 
would probably get on without me after I had gone 
out of it. Finally, Reason crawled up the steps of 
her long-forsaken throne, and I sank into a state of 
beatific coma, from which I did not relapse until I 



204 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

was once more startled by the head-lines of the 
ISTew York paper brought by the pilot. Care killed 
a cat, and it will kill a Cur-guest, if he doesn't let 
the world wag occasionally and give it, and him- 
self, and us a rest. 

The most restful bath I ever took was at Wies- 
baden, because I read over my tub the inscription 
taken from the baths of Antoninus : 

" Thou shouldst come hither free from care, if 
thou wouldst depart healed of disease, for here the 
careless alone are healed." 

I. prescribe a bath in that sentiment for the ter- 
rier who, in his intensity to set the world to rights, 
has set himself to wrongs. 

True enough, Saratoga is the very place for con- 
ventions. There is no such place for conventions 
designed to set the world to rights, whether it be 
the world here or the world hereafter ; but Sara- 
toga is the place for vacations as well as conven- 
tions, and for those who can combine the two. The 
Cosmopolitan Spa is the place for everything and 
everybody. 

There is no vitalized air like that of Saratoga for 
the morbid earnestness to flee to, nor for any one 
to flee to who has little health, and less money, and 
a temper out of gear ; but Saratoga, with all its 
kindly summer skies above, its friendly earth be- 
neath, and its healing waters under the earth, can- 
not restore or recruit the reason of the terrier who 
will continue to hunt rats, even in the hotel piazza, 



THE SARATOGA GAYETY CURE. 205 

or in the shade of the parks, or at the bottom of his 
glass of bicarbonate of baryta. 

What, for example, could be better calculated to 
rest the brain and recruit the nerves of the terrier 
than a Saratoga Garden Party ? 

The spectacle at the Grand Union during one of 
these festivals of an evening, when the fountains 
glitter in their colored lights and the colossal elms 
reach out their sheltering arms over the merry 
throng, is not excelled at any European spa. 

Of course, it has its Thackerian point of view, 
for, of course, the hod-carrier's son asked the pea- 
nut-vendor's daughter whether she did not think it 
was " rawther a mixed crowd, you know ;" and, of 
course, Mr. de Dude, whose father struck oil in '80, 
asked Mademoiselle von Nude whether it did not 
look to her like " somewhat of a miscellaneous as- 
sortment." Of course, when the old lady's unpro- 
tected shoulders shivered in the bracing evening air 
of the Saratoga summer, her old bear must have 
his ancient jest at her expense. 

"Cold, my dear?" 

" Yes ; what shall I do to get warm ?" 

"I'll tell you what to do." 

"What?" 

" Put on another bracelet !" 

Of course, the churls must have their sneers, but 
the satirist's way is not the only way of looking at 
the evolution of human plumage. The Garden 
Party has its uses. It is, like all occasions when 



206 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

society is in session, a school of manners, a camp 
for social discipline, a gallery of beautiful faces and 
unsophisticated busts, and a choice display in the 
art of competitive millinery. It is an exceptional 
exhibition in the " fleeting show," showing the best 
that can be done by the world's great democracy in 
breeding and dressing, in grace of movement and 
conversational vocabulary, in the thousand little 
artifices and arts that lower our voices, conceal our 
claws, and turn up the corners of our mouths. 

The Garden Party cuts straight across the grain of 
the dead-in-earnestness of our setters of the world 
to rights. It polishes the rich, gives employment to 
the poor, promotes trade, and opens new opportuni- 
ties for the cunning fingers and the industrious loom. 

The Saratoga Gayety Cure is accessible to the 
terrier and Cur- guest. He may not be financially 
or even physically able to compass Carlsbad, and 
even if he is, it will only be a brief makeshift, 
while Saratoga may be to him not simply a tempo- 
rary resort for a transient convalescence, but a per- 
manent home, where his health will be secure. 

For the very best thing the terrier who is digging 
his grave with his digging for rats can do for him- 
self and for the world out of joint, is to build a 
kennel for himself on the sunny western hills that 
command the Adirondacks or out on the top of the 
eastern Plateau, where he may reconsider his in- 
tensity and allay the hot passion of his distempered 
blood. 






THE SARATOGA GAYETY CUKE. 207 

He shall go and sit and hear the bands play and 
see the diamonds sparkle, or he may from " the 
loopholes of retreat peep at the great Babel," and 
" not feel the crowd." He shall choose between 
the Gayety Cure and the Rest Cure, or he may 
combine the two, which he can do at the Cosmo- 
politan Spa as he can do nowhere else. 

Then shall the intensity which is eating as doth a 
cancer, because it is a cancer in the mind, give 
place to a serenity which will cause his temper to 
sweeten, his gait to slacken, his muscle to accumu- 
late, and his health to spring forth speedily. Sara- 
toga shall be to him as it has been to me, and will 
be to many yet, the shadow of a great rock in a 
weary land. 







CHIPS AND WAFERS. 

By a poetical coincidence, sufficient of itself to 
justify these Chips and "Wafers, the wound of the 
Emperor Charles IV., which he received at the 
battle of Crecy, was healed by the waters of Carls- 
bad in 1358, and the wound of Major-General 
William Johnson, Bart., which he received at the 
battle of Lake George, was healed by the waters of 
Saratoga in 1767. 

Here's to the memory of the monarch, and the 
knight, and to the prosperity of these two healing 
waters, and to the health of those who are seeking it 
at either of them ! 

The Drug Cure has no friends in Germany. 
Mineral water is used by the German doctors to 
counteract the diseases caused by medicine. The 
waters of Luchon are prescribed for those who 
have been injured by the mercury and calomel pre- 
scriptions of their family physicians. 

When Sir Walter Scott's Uncle Thomas was 
dying, at ninety years of age, they put medicine into 
his mouth, and he spat it into his handkerchief, say- 
ing, "I have lived without drugs, and I shall die 



210 



SARATOGA CHIPS. 



without them." The sensible and classical Celsus 
said, " The best medicine is to take no medicine." 



I came into the world just as castor-oil was going 
out of it — as a medicine. It required seven adults 
to accomplish the castor-oil treatment, although I 
was only about seven years of age. There was one 
at each leg, one at each arm, one with my head in 

his hands, one 
to steady the 
funnel in my 
mouth, and one 
to pour in the 
oil. But when 
they let me up, 
I let up the cas- 
tor-oil, and it 
has been up ever 
since. Now, cas- 
tor-oil is used as 
a hair-oil, after 
it has been per- 
fumed, and the invalid infants are taken to the 
fountains of chloride of sodium. 




RESIDENCE OF DR. B. M. KENDALL. 



Do not be disheartened if the hrst results of min- 
eral waters are disheartening. I drank them one 
year, and was about to abandon them when the 
relief came. 

In cases where the water ultimately works a per- 



CHIPS AND WAFERS. 211 

manent cure, the first results are the opposite of 
those intended. Gastralgia is often aggravated be- 
fore it is cured by mineral water. 

A New York American tells rne that he has re- 
duced the art of living to something fine and 
clever. His home is in New York. lie spends his 
summers in Switzerland and his winters in the south 
of France. He occasionally stops over night in his 
palaces on Fifth Avenue and the Hudson. The 
American Croesus and the European sovereign re- 
semble the founder of Christianity in one respect 
at least — they do not know where to lay their head. 
He, however, because He had no place in which to 
lay it ; they because they have so many places pro- 
vided that they do not know which to choose. 
The donkey starves to death half way between the 
two stacks of hay. So rich is he in hay that he 
perishes for the want of it. There is nothing to 
choose in the way of discontent between those who 
amass a great property and those who amass a great 
poverty. 

It is an educational fallacy that information, es- 
pecially if it is " classical," guarantees efficiency. 
One man may have every kind of knowledge and 
no knack for utilizing it, while another may know 
nothing whatever except how to do one thing. 
There can be no doubt as to which of these men 
will succeed. Nor is the knack of the one any 



212 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

more to his credit than the want of it in the other a 
discredit. 

The successful may succeed in everything except 
recitation, and those who fail in life may never have 
failed in class. Some are quick to learn every les- 
son except their lesson in school, while others learn 
all the lessons in school and no lessons in life. 

Such is the fascination that the morbid biped 
feels for the methods devised and remedies in- 
vented for his benefit, that he becomes vexed and 
rebellious when he finds that he is not sufficiently 
disordered to try them all. It is an intolerable dep- 
rivation to be denied the use of a remedy. 

With what a supercilious air the traveller who 
has just obtained a bit of information dispenses it 
in answer to a question of a fellow-traveller, 
" And you never knew that ! Well, you are an 
ignoramus !" 

When George Washington asked Tom Conner 
the way to the High Rock Spring, Tom, not know- 
ing to whom he was speaking, rounded off his di- 
rections with, " Any darned fool ought to know 
the way. ' ' 

The railway-faring man, though a fool, may pos- 
sibly know all about the connections of his train, 
while the passenger, with the talents of an angel, 
may be ignorant of the information that he needs. 
How contemptuously he may be answered by the 



CHIPS AND WAFERS. 213 

brakeman ; but, then, he reciprocates the brake- 
man's sneer when the brakeman asks him the 
meaning of " St. Paul preferred" or " bulls and 
bears." 

We are all passengers, one knowing some things, 
another some other things, and none knowing all 
things — a fact which should make us kindly consid- 
erate one toward another. 

A portion of our happiness, at least, should be in 
promoting that of our fellows. 

Many an American of the United States species 
generates enough steam to run six businesses as 
large as his own, but does not save enough of it to 
carry on the one he has in hand. It escapes into 
the air instead of through the pipes. He spurts and 
wastes. Poor fellow ! there is little help for him 
in a climate so productive of spurts and wastes. 

A Long Island steamer captain said of his boat, 
" She won't hold her steam, sir ! If she would 
only hold her steam she would be the fastest boat 
on the Sound." ; . 

The American of the United States species is the 
fastest civilization on the globe, but he won't hold 
his steam, he will spurt, and must burst, and then 
he may be thankful that he can lay up at Saratoga 
for repairs. 

He might be even faster in the end if he would 
hold his steam at the beginning. The more haste 
the less health and the greater the number of wrecks 



214 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

in Washington and Wall Street. When Jerusalem 
shall become too fast, the Lord shall send among 
the fat ones leanness. 

Dearly beloved, don't try too hard to get well. 
The effort to secure health is often detrimental to 
it. It cultivates apprehension, stimulates nervous- 
ness, which, in turn, counteracts the effect of the 
remedy, and, what is worse, interferes with diges- 
tion. 

jSpeaking of moderation as a treatment, will not 
our venerated Mamma Dame Nature be good enough 
to set us the example ? 

She might turn off the draft from her " central 
fires," and give orders to Boreas to keep his 
cyclones to himself and the Rocky Mountains, and 
cultivate more uniformity in the thermometer. 

Good company is a factor in any Treatment. Lone- 
liness may counteract the effect of the most effec- 
tive remedy. Home-sickness is a powerful ally of 
every other sickness, and may even be the cause of 
any other. It is, therefore, all important that the 
vitiated American who goes so far from home as 
Carlsbad, in Bohemia, for his health, or the vitiated 
Dutchman who goes so far from home as Saratoga, 
in America, to recruit his wasted tissues, should 
have congenial companions, with whom he can ex- 
change cheerful opinions on the outcome of the 
battle. 



CHIPS AND WAFERS. 215 

Man has developed and developed until he has 
become the Cur-guest of the animal creation. He 
has health to search for, while all the other ani- 
mals have only food and shelter to secure. What a 
saving of time and brawn for the animals below us 
to have no clothes to provide, or health to restore, 
or insoluble problems to solve ! 

When we are a little ill or down, it is he of the 
scythe and the hour-glass scratching us with the 
scythe, and when we recover we part with him with 
a mixture of relief and apprehension, for we know 
that he will soon return and show us by his glass 
that our sands have run out, and then cut us down 
once for all with his scythe. 

Death has become so fashionable that I am culti- 
vating a liking for it myself. 

Nor should we complain of the suddenness of our 
taking off. I am quite enamoured of that form of 
euthanasia. 

The suddener the better. It is the only compen- 
sation for being in the enemy's country, with ad- 
vance impossible and retreat cut off. It is best not 
to know that you have left this world until you find 
yourself in another ! Yes, there is just one other 
compensation for falling in this enemy's country, 
he is our last enemy. 

It is not at all likely that human life would be of 
satisfactory length to us, no matter how long it 
might be extended. Jacob called the days of the 



216 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

years of his pilgrimage few and evil, although they 
were one hundred and thirty years, because he had 
not attained unto the days of the years of the life 
of his fathers. 

Gough's death was as glorious as his life was use- 
ful. He died at the right time in the right way. 
He went down with colors flying and every faculty 
at its post fighting for dear life. 

Gough's career sets at defiance the whole army of 
arguments for the system of education by recitation. 
He never crammed for an examination in trigo- 
nometry, or recited a lesson in synecdoche, or com- 
mitted to memory the emphasis of Hamlet's solil- 
oquy, or acquired the gesticulation of quinces, pota- 
toes, and watermelons. 

I once said to him, " You ought to be, as you de- 
serve to be, a rich man." " Yes," he replied, " I 
would be but for my credulity. You have no idea 
how many people there are in the world who 
promise to pay me just as soon as they get out of 
my sight." Like Wendell Phillips, he believed in 
every man who had a tear in his eye, or a silver 
mine in Mexico. 

If you are suffering from " overwork," stop 
overworking, but do not be overmuch afraid of 
overmuch work. You might have a worse epitaph 
than " overworked. " One who died of overwork 
at forty- eight said, in answer to remonstrance, " I 



CHIPS AND WAFERS. 217 

would not lose the ends of living for the sake of 
life." Life is hardly worth living if we have to 
stop living in order to keep alive. Better die in 
the ranks fighting than on furlough resting, es- 
pecially if your malady is not overwork, but over- 
indulgence. 

" The end of work is to enjoy leisure," said 
Aristotle, but, alas ! the effect of work is to 
make leisure the harder work of the two. We 
might as well make up our mind to it, the harder 
we work, the better work we do, and the sooner 
we die. We can do no good fighting without ex- 
posure to the masked battery and the ambuscade. 
There is no better evidence of the fact that the 
battle of life is fought in the enemy's country. We 
cannot know his plan of campaign, and hence can 
have none of our own. 

It is not simply the treadmill of our occupation 
that wears us out and compels us to lay up at Sar- 
atoga or Carlsbad for repairs, it is the perplexities 
that are inseparable from our business or profes- 
sion. It is the tangles that we find it so easy to get 
into and so difficult to get out of. 

An eminent physician tells me how, when per- 
plexed over a new complication of diseases, he will 
walk the floor of his chamber at night, thinking in- 
tensely, until the solution flashes upon him at the 
height of his strain — the hardest strain the human 
mind has to bear. 



218 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

Here comes in that inexplicable and awful law of 
self-sacrifice. The highest reaches in discovery and 
attainment are made in these moments of perplexity 
and apprehension which upset the nervous system 
and break the mental machinery. 

Darwin's industry was suicidal. The relentless 
law followed the Beagle round the world, and never 
left its victim until it left him in his grave. 

M. Louis Langue is not only in favor of the sur- 
vival of the fittest, but he insists that nature should 
not be thwarted in her endeavor to weed out those 
who are unfit to survive in the struggle for exist- 
ence. The Spartans were quite right, he says, in 
despatching their deformed offspring, and we should 
follow their example, and do away with drugs, hos- 
pitals, and the learned faculty. Coddling the dis- 
eased has diseased the race, until there is now scarcely 
a member of the human family, except among the 
barbarians, who is not obliged to seek restoration in 
the waters and the climate of Saratoga Springs. 

The dying are to be allowed to die and the 
feeble to go to the wall, and in a few generations 
only the sound constitutions would survive. 

Professor Francis Newman is an advocate of eu- 
thanasia, which is only another name for the trans- 
lation of those of us who are a burden to the rest 
of us. He would not allow tender kinsfolk to 
sacrifice youthful health, in order to add days or 
weeks to life after it is worn out. He would 



CHIPS AND WAFERS. 219 

have commissioners who visit lunatic asylums called 
upon authoritatively for their sincere opinions on 
the subject of euthanasia. 

One might be very sincerely of the opinion that 
the world would be better off if all its lunatics were 
well out of it, and, nevertheless, have an equally sin- 
cere aversion to going about among them clapping 
a chloroform sponge to their noses. 

Luck consists as much in having the qualifica- 
tions for doing a thing as in inheriting the money 
which enables you to acquire it. You are lucky 
enough to know how to keep accounts, to manage a 
manufactory, or to make " everything you touch 
turn to gold." 

" It takes more to make a rich man now than it 
did formerly." 

Nonsense ! Any man is rich who has a roof over 
his head and income enough to pay his bills and 
taxes. He is the man to snap his fingers at the de- 
preciation of securities and the fluctuations in trade. 

It is curious that a man's strong point will be his 
ruin. That is because he presumes upon it and ex- 
poses it to attack once too often. 

The wide-awake are caught napping at last, the 
cunning fail from lack of cunning when the pinch 
comes, the witty are at their wits 1 end in the emer- 
gency, the wise make fools of themselves just when 






220 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

their wisdom is most needed, the discreet speak 
unadvisedly with their lips at the critical moment, 
the politician is impolitic where adroitness would 
have saved him, Napoleon was outgeneralled. They 
are all over- conceited, and crowd their luck. 

Jackson killed the best marksman in Tennessee 
with a weapon of the marksman's own choosing. 
It was luck's first attempt and the first failure of 
skill. Old Hickory proved his character by never 
gambling after his first win at the table. If you 
make a fortune by your venture, never venture again. 

When the rule of the Golden Rule comes in, no 
man will run out on four legs at every passing 
pedestrian or carriage, at the peril of broken bones 
or a murder, and a suit at law against the tax -payers. 
Nor will he sit on his haunches, lift up his nose, 
and bark all night long, and keep awake the weary 
and drive the sick distracted. It would be well for 
those to whom Providence has entrusted the care of 
a dog to teach themselves how to behave them- 
selves. For if the master behaves properly, his 
dog may. It is difficult to keep both the Golden 
Rule and a dog. 

A laborer's dog flew out at me. If I had killed 
him with my stick, I would have been clubbed or 
my chickens would have been poisoned. 

What with the upper millstone of capital and the 
nether millstone of labor, we who are neither cap- 
italists nor "laborers" are ground up. Labor can 



CHIPS AND WAFEES. 223 

strike, and capital can strike back, but we are power- 
less. 

The setters of the world to rights tell us that the 
business depression is caused by over-production. 

My Austrian friend, who has looked the whole 
matter over and under and through and through, 
is quite sure there are more boots and trousers, 
bread and watches, false teeth and petticoats, manu- 
factured than the human family requires or desires. 

How can that be, if one third of the human 
race are down with pneumonia for lack of trousers, 
and another third are at their last gasp because they 
are at their last loaf, while there is bread enough, 
and to spare, and to waste on Manhattan Island and 
the Queen's table ? The Texan is famishing for the 
wheat which in Minnesota is a drug, and the girls 
of Kamtchatka must let their hair hang from a defi- 
ciency in hair-pins which are manufactured in Con- 
necticut. The malarious Peruvian hears with de- 
spairing envy of the invigorating snow which his 
fellow-beings of Saratoga would gladly share with 
him. if he could. And yet, forsooth, business is de- 
pressed and the commercial world distraught be- 
cause too much wheat is grown and too many hair- 
pins are manufactured ! 

Is it over-production, or under-transportation, or 
both, or neither ? Or is there an ebb and flow of 
trade as inexplicable as the ebb and flow of the 
tides or the rise and fall of the aurora borealis ? 



224 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

Anybody can give an explanation for anything, 
but who can explain the explanation ? The fall of 
the apple is caused by the attraction of gravitation, 
but what is the attraction of gravitation ? Does it 
never occur to the jaunty setter of this world to 
rights that if he has found the solution of one of 
these riddles he has discovered the key that un- 
locks them all ? 

If by over-production, or over-crowding, or ab- 
senteeism, or individual ownership in land we could 
account for financial calamities and commercial dis^ 
tress, we would have a solution of the enigma of 
human life, in the presence of which the profound- 
est intellect stands silent and appalled. 

The most literal Spa of the " Season" description 
is Barreges, in the Pyrenees, where the dilapidated 
fashionables live in barracks which are put up in 
the spring and taken down in the autumn. This 
falls in well with the migratory nature of the genus 
Cur-guest. Eestlessness is one of his diseases, and 
he expects to cure it by indulging it. 

The difference between American and European 
prices is easily exaggerated. Even higher than 
New York prices are paid in Paris by the American 
from the United States, who whips out his purse 
because he has made up his mind that " everything 
is so much cheaper here than it is at home." 

He swallows every hook thrown by the wily 



CHIPS AND WAFERS. 225 

shopkeeper, however transparently covered with 
alluring bait. The price was doubled on the spot 
and before his eyes, but his eyes were holden by 
that eccentric freak of avarice that buys an article 
because it is cheap. 

Besides, it was "new," it was " just out," and 
"just beginning to be the rage," and was found 
afterward to have been the Christmas gift of a year 
before. 

The American from the United States (and a 
wealthy one at that) who boasts of living in Dres- 
den or Frankfort for a thousand dollars a year for- 
gets that many a New Englander has brought up a 
family of seven in the fear of the Lord on rive hun- 
dred dollars a year. 

Clothing is very much cheaper in London than 
in New York, but the New York tailor gives you a 
satisfactory fit, and the consequence is that his coat 
outlasts that with which you ran the blockade at the 
Custom House. You cannot wear out a garment 
that you dislike, while one that you are fond of lasts 
forever and a day. Nothing is cheap that is un- 
satisfactory. 

The spendthrift American from the United States 
is revolutionizing the prices faster than the polities 
of Europe. Every waiter knows him and grins at 
his approach, while the landlord uncovers and bends 
as low as he would to the Sultan or the Czar. But 
the Sultan or the Czar would probably knock him 



226 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

over, while the American from the United States is 
tickled out of his wits and franks by the mercenary 
obeisances. His gratuities to the servants make 
them gratuitously insolent to his poor devil of a 
countryman who has earned his guldens by the 
sweat of his own instead of his father's brow. 

The less the American who travels for informa- 
tion or health identifies himself with his fellow- 
citizens of the spendthrift species, the better for his 
purse and temper. Here is where a knowledge of 
the language tells. It gives him opportunities for 
economy and observation. 

He may put up at inns which Scattermoney has 
not demoralized. He may leave the beaten tracks 
of travel, and will find his gain in doing so, if he 
wishes to study the people, digest what he sees, and 
give himself a rest from the faces, voices, and opin- 
ions of his native village. 

In Carlsbad I paid five cents for a shave by 
going where the American from the United States 
is never to be seen, ten cents for a hair-cut, and 
two dollars and forty cents for a half- day's drive. 
In Saratoga you may get as well shaved for ten 
cents as you can for twenty-five, and your hair as 
well cut for twenty-five cents as for fifty, and your 
half-day's drive will cost you from two to ten dol- 
lars, according to your knowing how to secure it. 

It is an interesting incident of civilization that a 



CHIPS AND WAFEBS. 227 

war is going on all over the world between wages 
and gratuities, with the chances growing in favor 
of gratuities. Hotels that have taken the side of 
the wage system have been obliged to surrender, 
porter, waiter, boots, and all, to the system of gra- 
tuities. 

Europe, the Europe of Charlemagne and Bis- 
marck, charges you for the candle, but throws in a 
boot-jack. I tumbled over the boot-jack as soon 
as I had snuffed out the tallow dip. 

The European porter in full regimentals might 
be mistaken for a United States major-general fight- 
ing the Indians, whereas he is the major-general 
savage himself, whom we have to fight to save 
our scalps. 

The working-classes of England are, to use the 
familiar phrase of that land of endowed monarchy, 
" supported by voluntary contributions." The 
English laborer is expected to subsist upon them 
without growling about them. 

The amount of ''voluntary contributions' ' re- 
ceived by one for the support of st self, wife, and 
six children was eleven shillings a week. Yery 
often he had to keep his little ones on one and a 
half pence a day." Another "earned nine shil- 
lings a week, but since he has been a miller, and 
worked Sundays, he got twelve shillings a week." 
His wife says it " had often gone to her heart when 
she had only a bit of bread with nothing on it to 



228 SAEATOGA CHIPS. 

part among the children." Another says, " When 
a master offered me a shilling a day, I asked him if 
he wanted to make a rogne of me ; for I couldn't 
live honest on that money. " And why not be a 
rogue, since he would be allowed twice as much in 
the county jail as he receives from his employer ? 
If there is anything the State seems to prefer to 
punishing criminals, it is the manufacture of them. 
Surely the amounts received by these people will 
not be dignified by the honorable name of " wages," 
any more than their dwellings, described in the 
" Report of Commissioners " as a " disgrace to a 
Christian community, ' ' should be designated by the 
hallowed word "home." Nor can these people be 
called working men and women in any sense which 
may be regarded as creditable to a u Christian com- 
munity. ' ' 

We exult over the cheapness of the article or the 
lowness of the wage, and found an institution to 
support by our gratuities those who cannot be sup- 
ported by the wages that we give them. If justice 
prevailed, mercy might be dispensed with. 

The United States of America is following rapidly 
in the footsteps of " the European plan," and we 
shall soon all be compelled to dance attendance to 
the music of the continental tip. 

Whatever be the result of the struggle, the fact 
will remain that the system of fair wages is better 



CHIPS AND WAFERS. 229 

than unsystematic gratuities, and the keeping of the 
Golden Rule is always to be preferred to " support 
by voluntary contributions." 

Hygeia is wise in making much of music. All 
the animals are fond of it, man is particularly par- 
tial to it. He cannot walk through a dark woods 
without whistling. But perhaps he resorts to all 
music to keep his courage up and to get it up. We 
worship, fight, and dance to music, and are con- 
soled at dying with the hope of being escorted to 
the cemetery by a brass band playing the same 
march that led the funeral procession of the Iron 
Duke. 

At Kissingen the band passes under the windows 
in full blast at 5 a.m., calling the Cur-guest to his 
morning devotions at the shrine of Hygeia and her 
healing springs. A baker's dozen of brass bands 
may be heard at the same moment by any ear for 
music on any afternoon of August. 

The naming of a new town ought to be at- 
tended with as much thought and forethought as 
the naming of a baby, but it is not. It is de- 
spatched with thoughtless haste or with the same 
imitative thoughtlessness that gives a score of towns 
the same name. 

One would suppose that the vanity of the Ameri- 
can of the United States, who is so boastful of 
the self-reliance of his country, would suggest a 



230 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

little self reliance and a little originality in the 
naming of his towns and springs. 

A spring with a name in plain English, that had 
an easy and obvious meaning, might make a for- 
tune for its owner by the name alone. 

Penticosta, France, is, so far as I now know, the 
only place where the springs are named after the 
organ they profess to benefit. One is called 
" Sources of the Liver," a second, " Skin," a 
third, " Stomach." This is common-sense, how- 
ever commonplace, and suggests one name for a 
spring which would be a hit in the way of novelty 
and perspicacity — Liver "Water ! 

I think of such names as Atonic Spring, Atrophy 
Waters, Cachexia Elixir, or these : Herpes, Ec- 
zema, Dyspepsia, Hypertrophy, Idiopathic, Lithon- 
triptics, Panacea, Sciatica, Phthisis, Viscera, In- 
somnia, and Champagne Spring. 

But Liver Water excels them all, because a water 
that will keep the liver in repair would put an end 
to church troubles, society gossip, and political 
quarrels. 

You cannot increase the attractiveness of a resi- 
dence by detracting from its characteristics as a 
home. You cannot make a home out of a museum, 
or a museum out of a home. The two ideas are 
incompatible. To cram the house with curiosities 
worth their weight in gold, or to paper the walls 



CHIPS AND WAFERS. 231 

with Government bonds, or to load down the house 
with pictures, whose only merit to their owner is 
their cost, is to have neither a home, a gallery, nor 
a museum. 

A home is inexorable in its limitations. It will 
not tolerate excess. It must not be so loud that you 
cannot hear yourself talk in it or lose your identity 
in it. It repudiates vulgarity, and will not have 
decoration at the expense of comfort. 

The home may be of brick, or stone, or wood, 
but it must not be of marble. Cold, white marble 
for a mausoleum or for a tombstone, but not for a 
home or a communion-table. The eye must feel 
warm when it looks at a home. 

Build your house to catch the rays of the rising 
sun. Those are the rays that drive away the chill- 
damp of the night and cheer the heavy-hearted on 
a January morning. Put your bed where you will 
be awakened by the sunshine. A sunny greeting 
every day tells in the long run of a long life. The 
old idea of a " southern and eastern exposure" is 
the true one for both summer and winter, especially 
in a northern climate. Build against the western 
line of your lot, and put your stairway and hall on 
the least desirable side of your house for sitting in 
or sleeping in — the northern or western side. 

Keep on the sunny side of your lot, if you would 
have a sunny lot in life. 

Put a cellar under and a garret over your entire 
house, not a part of it, but the whole of it — an old- 



232 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

fashioned garret for the barrel of old love letters, a 
cellar for the apples and potatoes. No other por- 
tions of the house are more fruitful in convenience 
and comfort. They break the force of the sum- 
mer's heat and the winter's cold. 

So arrange your rooms that they will open into 
one another, and enable you to get the full benefit 
of the whole space in your house, upstairs and 
down, when you give an entertainment, and as little 
of the space as you desire when you wish to econ- 
omize on coal. Low ceilings will be of advantage 
in this respect. Ten feet is high enough for a ceil- 
ing where the mercury spends its nights in the 
vicinity of zero. 

While other Spas have been affected by the 
caprice of the fashionable invalid or the incon- 
stancy of the morbid vertebrate, and among them 
the original Spa itself, Carlsbad and Saratoga know 
no change in public approbation, except an increase 
in it as the seasons come and go. Last year was 
the greatest year that either of them has ever known, 
numerically or financially. 

As Pyrmont declines, Kissengen rises ; as Epsom 
recedes, Wiesbaden advances ; but Saratoga and 
Carlsbad are obliged to make new arrangements for 
the accommodation of the increasing number of 
Cur-guests, and pleasure-seekers, and seekers after 
rest. 



CHIPS AND WAFERS. 233 

The resort to the fountains of the saline elixir is 
governed by not only the whims of the restless in- 
valid, but by the caprices of superstition, which are 
never far from the beautiful trust of man in the in- 
scrutable providence of God. 

As long ago as 1556 the springs at Pyrmont, 
Westphalia, were thronged by those who attached 
a miraculous virtue to chloride of sodium in 
solution with carbonic-acid gas. The houses could 
not accommodate the throngs. Tents had to be 
provided. Ten thousand came at a time, and on 
foot. The scene was repeated at the close of the 
thirty years' war. The lame, the blind, the deaf, 
the paralytic, and miserable wretches covered with 
sores came to be healed by drinking of or bathing 
in the magical waters. The old were carried here 
from hundreds of miles away, to be made young 
again by a draught or a bath. And never does the 
goddess Hygeia feel more forgiving toward her 
children than when she looks down upon such 
scenes as these. 




A MUD BATH. 



THE SARATOGA WINTER CURE. 

Saratoga has what can be found at no other 
mineral-water resort in the world — the Winter 
Cure. So that while we can do here everything 
that can be done anywhere else, we can do here one 
thing that can be done nowhere else — we can com- 
bine the Mineral-Water Treatment with the out-of- 
door winter sports, which are not to be surpassed 
by any other method of recruiting the worn-out and 
thinned-out army of humanity in its heroic fight for 
a long life and a good digestion. 

Greece and Rome could not endure their high- 
toned civilization, and their baths could not save 
them, because they had no winter in which to re- 
cruit the energies enfeebled by the summer. All 
summer and no winter makes the struggle for exist- 
ence unendurable. 

" Knowest thou the land where the bright lemon 
blows ?" I do, and I know it to be the land where 
the tarantula crawls up your legs and the miasma 
enfeebles your joints. " Calm lie the" turtles, and 
so do the real-estate advertisements. If " there, 
oh, there," my loved one wishes to " wander free," 
she can wander without me. 

Yes, deliver this old traveller from the profes- 



236 



SARATOGA CHIPS. 



sional climate of the sunny South, whether summer 
or winter. It will make you feel like sleeping or 
fighting, never like working for a living, or even 
for amusement. You grow supple, limber, and 
polite, indolent and irritable. 

So long as you are flattered, you are jolly ; as soon 
as you are contradicted, you are mad enough to 
strike. Where the sun colors the skin, as the to- 
bacco colors the 
meerschaum, 
you will find 
. the. hue is that 
of the bile, and 
the bilious are 
making a noble 
fight of it on 
the banks of 
the Rio Grande 
and the Bay of 
Bengal. All 
the pretty saf- 
fron races are scrofulous. The interminable summer 
may soften the manners, but it weakens the vital 
forces. The Vermonter uses his hip-pocket for a 
memorandum-book, the Texan for a six-shooter, 
and a stiletto glitters in the belt of the gay mus- 
tachio " where the golden orange grows." 

A climate without a winter accounts for it all. 
Its hot nights alone are enough of themselves to 
bring on the feuds that lead to the extermination 




r.:.:: v> 



KESIDENCE OF E. T. BEACKETT, ESQ. 



THE SAEATOGA WINTER CURE. 239 

of families by the skilful frequency of the shot- 
gun. 

Tropical winters, so far from curing malaria, 
promote it, and with it promote ticks, snakes, and 
scorpions. The atmosphere alone is a weariness to 
the flesh. It is an insidious atmosphere, insidious 
and treacherous. It makes you feel good, but the 
feeling is perilous. It is the good feeling of a bad 
liver. It is the enervation of decline. 

Saratoga is free from the lizards of the South 
and the blizzards of the West. The wind blows, 
but not often or ferociously, and the tornado re- 
coils when it strikes our eastern range of hills, and 
falls back in bad order when it attacks the army of 
trees that cover the Adirondacks. 

The Winter Cure is a Home Cure. It compels 
that alliance of out-door and in-door life which 
secures the benefit of both, and avoids the evil 
effects of either when either has the morbid homo 
all to itself. It will be the last attainment in civili- 
zation when the only in-door animal can keep these 
two hemispheres evenly balanced and joined. 

The winter necessitates the hearthstone of varie- 
gated tile, and a chimney that does not smoke, and 
the fireside made of poetry and pressed brick, which 
the furnace in the cellar has in vain endeavored 
to undermine. Think of a battle fought in north- 
ern New York for our altars and, instead of its 
firesides, our furnaces in the cellar ! 

The Saratoga Winter Treatment compels the cul- 



240 . SARATOGA CHIPS. 

tivation of the in-door qualities and the home-life 
virtues, which are indispensable to the stability of 
society and the State. It awakens the inventive 
and reflective faculties, the conversational powers, 
the decorative arts, and the art of amiable gossip. 

The crackling fireplace (if it does not smoke) 
kindles the love of pictures and books, cats and 
dogs, children and women, and gives the women an 
opportunity to Christianize the men ! 

The Winter Cure cures duelling. Open argu- 
ment is substituted for the secret stiletto. Egypt, 
Greece, and "Rome would have been alive to-day 
if they had hired a house for the winter at Saratoga 
Springs. 

Tropical nations flash up and die out, the nations 
that have one hundred days of sleighing live on 
forever. The summer lands may grow an occa- 
sional artist or opera-singer, the lands of the tobog- 
gan-slide produce a whole race of unconquerable 
men and women. 

What has become of the Latin and the Frank on 
this continent ? Whither come the races that are 
colonizing the world? The North and West are 
coming with their babel of opinions and patents, 
and the South and East are going with their scrofula 
and guitars. 

Our aesthetes bemoan our deficiency in " atmos- 
phere," and " ivy," and " lichens," in the " mist 
of distance to soften the outlines," in " picturesque 
and gloomy wrongs," in Roman noses, Creole com- 



THE SARATOGA WINTER CURE. 243 

plexions, and Greek chins. That complaint comes 
of a gelatine vertebra, which, in turn, comes of 
summering in the winter of the Antilles. It devel- 
ops into the bumptiousness of rhetorical facility. 
It is not the malady that killed Sir John Franklin 
or Sir William Johnson. There is no remedy for 
it except the Saratoga Winter Cure. 

No, no. We Americans should not covet refine- 
ment as a substitute for stamina. We should not 
wish to exchange Teutonic pertinacity for Grecian 
physiognomy or the endurance of the Saxon for 
the urbanity of the Latin. Only hard substances 
take the highest polish. 

The winds that will bring us the cooks and voters 
that we need blow from the Scandinavian shore, 
and not from the jungles of India. We need not 
the enervating breath from the equator, but the 
invigorating breeze from the open Polar sea. 

Therefore, when our aesthetes pipe unto us we 
cannot dance, and when they whine we cannot 
lament. 

There is one injurious effect of the climate of 
this planet that is not so injurious at the North as 
at the South during the winter. It may be called 
the perspiration peril. You perspire easily, and 
cool rapidly. The slightest exertion opens all the 
pores, the shortest pause closes them all. This 
moment is, indeed, momentous. The victims of 
pneumonia and bronchitis, of quick and slow con- 
sumption, are caught by its chill and thrown by its 



244 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

shock. A ride home from a hot dance, a chat of a 
few seconds with a friend on the street while your 
skin is moist and warm, and the demon of the at- 
mosphere has done his deadly work with the pre- 
cision of an assassin. u Where did I catch this 
cold ?" is an every-day conundrum. You caught 
it on one of your voyages of this planet on its axis. 

On one of these revolutions Bombi, the rhinoc- 
eros, caught his death of cold — Bombi with all his 
cheek and hide ! " The keeper threw open both 
of the big doors' ' on the big beast, and Bombi shiv- 
ered, groaned, and died — a victim to the transition 
peril. The shiver that you feel when you sit down 
in a profuse perspiration under the tree will be 
called pneumonia in your obituary. It is the busi- 
ness of the planet to revolve upon its axis and 
around the sun, without any regard whatever to 
the thoughtlessness of Bombi's keeper or the lovely 
daughter's satin slippers and nude arms. 

The " Roman fever" begins with the pause in 
the shade, to escape the direct rays of the sun. No 
one can travel under the blue sky of Italy in winter 
or summer without observing and feeling the differ- 
ence between the open sunshine of the street and 
the shadow of the houses. It is that transition to 
which the native becomes acclimated, and which few 
foreigners can survive. 

The same effect is produced by our climate, the 
same in kind, less in degree. We wilt gradually or 
die suddenly with the American instead of the 



THE SARATOGA WINTER CURE. 247 

Roman fever. It is the climate of the planet on 
which life is an incident, and the life of man the 
most incidental of all — the life that is but a vapor 
that appeareth for a little time and then vanisheth 
away. But the Northern winter is not by any means 
so addicted to the perspiration peril as the South- 
ern. It is not absolutely free from it, but it is 
comparatively free from it. You, at least, escape 
the night perspiration, which leaves you as wearied 
and exhausted when you awake in the morning as 
when you went to sleep in the evening. You may 
have to raise your umbrella in the middle of the 
day for a few days in August, but you need never 
be subjected to the destroying strain of sitting on 
your door-step with your tongue out for four 
months of the year. 

It is impossible to sink to so low a state of 
relaxation in the land of the frozen river and the 
snow as in the section where the " lazy gallants 
bask in ladies' eyes." 

There is no tonic for the system like an atmos- 
phere that contains it. No remedy can compare 
with it. When it is found, it is to be treated as 
truth is to be treated. You are to buy it, and sell 
it not. 

If, however, you are compelled to sell it, you can 
sell it to advantage, if you have bought it with a 
house and lot at pleasant Saratoga. There you may 
have air, land, sun, water, and winter all for what 
you pay elsewhere for your house alone, from which 



248 SARATOGA CHIPS. 

you are compelled to nee to escape its hot nights, 
cockatrices, and yellow jackets. 

What must be the horror of Hygeia, then, to see 
her children fleeing from Saratoga to New York in 
September, the month that has the worst reputation 
for prostrating malaria of any month of the twelve, 
especially at the great centres of seething population. 

It is the period of decaying vegetation. The 
frost has not killed the germs of mephitis in the air 
or stopped the miasmatic exhalations from the 
ground. Preachers sink exhausted in the pulpit, 
clerks faint at their desks, and ladies are prostrated 
by their ordinary ronnd of household duties. All 
lose what they have gained by their summer vaca- 
tion by returning to their posts before the summer 
is over. It often proves an irrecoverable loss. 

But a change is setting in. The life of those 
who are living it so as to make the most of it is 
other-ended. Saratoga, with its Winter Cure, 
and Mineral- Water Cure, and Climate Cure, and 
Gayety Cure, is getting to be the big end of life. 
New York and New Orleans, with their malarious 
summers and nefarious politics, are henceforth to 
have the little end of life. 

The city is a workshop, distracting to the wits, 
shattering to the nerves, poisonous to the lungs. 
The community of villas is resuming the place that it 
had in classic days, as the place of residence of those 
who wish to mix enjoyment with business and rec- 
reation with the greed for gain. 



THE SARATOGA WINTER CURE. 249 

'Nor shall they be able to complain that the place 
of restful homes is dull. They shall have excite- 
ment enough, bnt it shall not be that which is eat- 
ing the flesh from their bones and the hair from 
their heads. It shall restore the lost brawn, and 
conceal the bald crowns with a - picturesque toque, 
and color their wattles as red as a turkey-gobbler's. 

The Cosmopolitan Spa has always had the whole 
world at its doors in summer ; now there is no more 
lively and exhilarating scene in winter than that 
which the winter sports and the Winter Cure have 
brought to Saratoga. The toboggan-slide has no 
superior for length, rapidity, management, and 
geographical location. 

Some need only the Winter Treatment. One 
winter of it may restore them. They may need 
only to allow the atmosphere of winter to get at 
them, and into them, and through them. They 
should go into it, in order that it may get into 
them. It is bathing in it and breathing it. 

Cold air seldom injures, hot air is to some very 
injurious. It is not the winter, but the transitions 
from cold weather to warm in winter that does the 
injury. An open winter may lower the bills for 
coal, but it raises the bills of mortality. The long, 
uniform sunny winter of Saratoga Springs has been 
the saving of many a useful man and noble woman, 
although it may have prolonged some lives that 
might as well have been abbreviated. 

The winters of 1883-84 and 1886-87 at Saratoga 



250 



SARATOGA CHIPS. 



will long be remembered for the new lease of life 
they gave to many a good soldier that was falling 
out on the march. 

The only hope for the human family is to pass a 
Saratoga winter through its dilapidated constitu- 
tion. 







The author of this book will be glad to answer the inquiries of any 

one who wishes to secure a home at 

Saratoga Springs. 



SARATOGA SPRINGS: 



ITS 



PUBLIC OFFICIALS; CHURCHES; SCHOOLS; 
ASSOCIATIONS; PHYSICIANS; RAILWAYS; 
BANKS; STORES; HOTELS; MINERAL 
SPRINGS; NEWSPAPERS; ARCHI- 
TECTS ; DRIVES ; WALKS ; and 
REAL ESTATE DEALERS. 



TO ADVERTISERS. 

The publishers of this book would call the special attention 
of advertisers to the following pages of it. The advertisements 
and the reading matter will be so arranged as to make it a 
very desirable place for advertisements of the highest class. 

Those who wish to advertise in future editions should apply 
at once to the publishers, 

FUNK & WAGNALLS, 

18 & 20 Astor Place, New York. 



SAEATOGA TILLAGE OFFICIALS. 

President. — Lewis Wood. 

BOARD OF TRUSTEES. 

W. H. Gailor, 
B. T. Bacon, 
Frank W. Wells, 
Patrick Sheehan, 
Michael Finn, 
B. W. Clapp. 

Tillage Cleric. — S. F. Corey. 

Village Attorney. — Charles H. Tefft, Jr. 

Village Surveyor. — L. H. Cramer. 



Postmaster. — George W. Langdon. 



Established 18 Years. 

SARATOGA REAL ESTATE 

OFFICE. 

CONKLING & KNAPP, 

" ml Instate ^vohtxs t 

Ho. 6 POST-OFFICS ARCADH, 

Offer the most desirable (Real Estate in Saratoga 
Springs and vicinity for sale. 

Also make a specialty of Renting 

Furnished Cottages for the Season. 



Call on them before going elsewhere. Their long ex- 
perience in the business enables them to offer greater 
bargains than any other parties. 



Open every Day and Evening all the Year round, 

FROM 6 A.M. TO lO P.M. 



THE 





Spring Street, near Broadway. 



J® 



AR ATO O A 



J® 



PRINOS. 



-••■Ill^tllim— — 



^HE BNCL0SED PAVILI0M 



Which contains the Hathorn Spring, has been greatly en- 
larged and very much improved, and now affords every 
convenience and comfort for visitors and invalids. 

It is exactly in the centre of the village, very near all the 
hotels, boarding-houses, stores, halls, thoroughfares and 
railway stations. 

It is so situated and arranged as to be cool during the 
hottest days of summer, and it is warmed during the winter, 
and therefore perfectly comfortable in the coldest weather. 

Whatever may be the weather at any season of the year, 
the Hathorn Pavilion is always pleasant and attractive. 

Such a resort has long been demanded at Saratoga Springs, 
and is thoroughly appreciated, hundreds of persons having 
availed themselves of it during the past winter. 



Sathorn Water. 



HE Hathorn Spring Water has earned so 
extensive and satisfactory a reputation that 
testimonials are superfluous. 

It is known everywhere as a quick and thorough 
(Remedy for 

TORPID LIVER, 



Diseased Kidneys, Sluggish Blood, Dyspepsia, 



GASTRALGIA, 

and all ills of the Stomach that cause melan= 
cholia, headache and nervous prostration. 

It has been enthusiastically approved by hun= 
dreds of thousands of persons who have quaffed its 
sparkling liquid at the brink of the Spring itself 
while other hundreds of thousands, at a distance, 
have found its perfectly preserved bottled waters 
to be a long=wished=for boon. 

It never dulls into inactivity by long continued 
use. The secretory 'functions respond to its pleas= 
antly effervescent demand with unfailing readiness. 

It never causes pain or nausea. The only way 
in which the system is aware of its presence is by 
the beneficent effects it produces. 



THE 



WAJ^0^-5pRI|MG-y/\TE^ 



It ^oniains |oto|j |njur L ious 



CF. CHANDLER, Ph.D., M.D., of the School of Mines, 
• Columbia College, New York, who stands as a chem- 
ist at the head of his profession, says : 

" No water in Saratoga County is more highly favored by nature than the 
Hathorn Water. If the popular verdict accords it the preference, the water 
will merit it. There is nothing in the water that can in any way injure the 
most delicately organized system, provided it is not used in excess, or at im- 
proper times." 



THE LEADING AMERICAN 
SPRING. • 

The annual sale in bottles of this most popular mineral water 

VERY LARGELY EXCEEDS 

the sale in bottles of all other natural bottled mineral waters 
of Saratoga combined. 



]^he J4athof(jn JSprinq Water 



Is Soli in Glass Bottles only— Pints and Quarts. 



PRICES AS FOLLOWS t 

One Case, 4 dozen pints, . . . . $6 oo 

One Half-Case, 2 doze* pints, ... 3 oo 

One Case, 2 dozen quarts, . . . 5 oo 

Delivered free on board at Saratoga, securely 
packed for shipment. 

Delivery at any place in New York, Brooklyn or Jersey 
City, 50 cents per package additional. 



SOLD BY GROCERS, WINE MERCHANTS, DRUGGISTS AND 
HOTELS. 



Orders will receive prompt attention, and will be for- 
warded to destination by the best freight lines. 



E. H. HATHORN, 
jM^rn spring, 

Saratoga, N. Y. 




LAKE ANNA, MT. MCGREGOR. 



MAGNETIC SPUING WATER. 

Spring Avenue, a few minutes' walk from the leading Hotels. 

The proprietor has made extensive and expensive im- 
provements in his 

BATHING ESTABLISHMENT. 

It is elegant and comfortable. It is the only one in 
Saratoga which has porcelain-lined bath-tubs. The build- 
ing is provided with steam heater and electric bells, and 
no effort will be spared to contribute to the comfort and 
enjoyment of the bathers. 

These magnetic water baths are, as is well known, a 
remedy for rheumatism, neuralgia, nervous prostration, 
and diseases peculiar to women. 

They have a powerful effect also in relieving weariness 
and exhaustion. They produce healthy sleep. They are 
at once a tonic and a stimulant, and are very cleansing 
and softening to the skin. 

AS A REMEDIAL DRINK 

the Magnetic Spring Water is too well and widely known 
to need testimonials. It has worked wonderful cures in 
cases of dyspepsia, liver difficulties, kidney troubles, and 
weakness of the lungs. 

A regular and systematic use of it results in toning up 
the constitution worn down by overwork, and it is very 
agreeable to the taste. 

A conveyance will be run to and from the spring dur- 
ing the season through the principal thoroughfares. 

All inquiries promptly answered by 

D. H. Porter. 



SAKATOGA PHYSICIANS. 

Babcock, M. N. 

Boyce, F. M. 

Comstock, G. F. 

Craighead, E. D. 

Farrell, J. J. 

Grant, C. S. 

Hall, W. H. 

Hamilton, Robert. 

Hewitt, Adelbert. 

Hodgman, W. H. 

Inlay, E. G. 

McEwen, R. C. 

Moriarta, I). C. 

Pearsall, S. J., Homoeopathist. 

Pearsall, J. A., " 

Reynolds, T. B. 

Robens, T. 

Stewart, Mrs. Mary E. 

Strong, S. S. 

Strong, S. E. 

Travers, O. J., Homoeopathist. 

Wilson, Mrs. Wheeler. 

Patients for board and treatment are received by 
Drs. Grant, Hamilton, Robens, Strong, Stewart, 
and Wilson, and every attention is given to their 
health, comfort, and recreation. Letters addressed 
to either of these physicians will receive prompt 
attention. 



4HA 1 



Fast Time and Elegant Service by the Picturesque 

N. Y. CENTRAL AND HUDSON RIVER R. R., 

Along the world-famed Hudson River between New Tork and Saratoga ; through 

the beautiful Mohawk Valley between Saratoga and Ruffnlo, 

Xiagara Falls and the West. 

THE ONLY GREAT FOUR-TRACK RAILROAD IN THE WORLD. 




o 

i3 ri" 

S° 
o d 

^ to • 

bO cei CO 

.S 5 3 

P.^1 o 



to 



r a 



5 (U pj 

£ tf CO 

o <,: ;q 

8^ a 

toS * 

5 Is 

<rf ~ rt 



bo ^ 



THE SARATOGA LIMITED, S?^.S3S?. T .^ %i£Z2£ri& 

business men and pleasure travel- CIT Tickets sold and Drawing-room accommodations 

reserved at anv Ticket Office of New York Central and Hudson River Railroad in New York or Saratoga, 
or by addressing M. C. ROACH, General Eastern Passenger Agent, at No. 413 Broadway, New Yoek. 



Grand Central Station. New York. 



HENRY MONETT, Gen'l Passenger Agent. 



CHUBCRES. 

First Baptist Church. — Pastor, Rev. George B. 
Foster. 

Begent Street Baptist Church. — Pastor, Rev. R. 
F. McMichael. 

Bethesda Protestant-Episcopal Church. — Rector, 
Rev. Joseph Carey, D.D. 

First Methodist Church. — Pastor, Rev. S. Y. 
Leech, D.D. 

Free Methodist Church. — Pastor, Rev. Zenas 
Osborne. 

Zion Methodist Church. — Pastor, Rev. A. 
Walker. 

New England Congregational Church. — Pastor, 
Rev. T. W. Jones. 

St. Peter's Catholic Church. — Pastor, Rev. 
Father John McMenomy. 

First Presbyterian Church. — Pastor, Rev. 
Charles J. Young. 

Second Presbyterian Church. — Pastor, Rev. W. 
R. Terrett. 

First Society of Spiritualists. — President, H. J. 
Horn, Esq. 



S. GIFFORD SLOCUM, 
Architect, 

SARATOaA SPRINGS, 1ST.Y. 



COUNTRY HOUSES A SPECIALTY. 



The following buildings are among those designed by Mr. Slocum 



House of H. S. Leech, Esq., Saratoga. 
11 E. C. Clark, Esq., 
" Isaac N. Phelps, 
11 F. A. White, 
" Mrs. D. S. Lathrop, 
" Mr. Geo. P. Lawton, 
" Mr. J. H. Pardue, 



House of Mr. B. J. KendaJI, Saratoga 
Second Presbyterian Church, " 
Presbyterian Church, Pt. Henry, N.Y. 
Sherman Library, " 

House of Mrs. C. M. Schieffelin, Lake 

George. 
House of E. T. Brackett, Saratoga. 



WORK DONE IN ANY PART OF THE COUNTRY. 



B. 



Saratoga Springs, 



ACCOMMODATES 1000 PERSONS. 



f(kteg, $3.00 cpef f)ky ioi fjoon^, 

Except those on parlor and first floors. 



OPEN FROM JUNE 18th TO OCT. 1st. 



H. S. CLEMENT, 

Manager. 



SAEATOGA MUSEUM. 

Visitors to Saratoga Springs will miss a rare op- 
portunity for entertainment and instruction if they 
do not take a stroll through Dr. Haskins's cabinet 
and Museum of Natural History at the Seltzer 
building. 

» This is pronounced by the best judges to be one 
of the most extensive and varied private collec- 
tions in this country. 

It contains most of the fauna of the Western 
States, and more than twenty thousand specimens 
illustrating Geology, Mineralogy, Palaeontology, 
Archaeology, etc., and many thousand crystals, 
gems, concretions, fossils, and minerals, foreign and 
native, and specimens illustrating the coal-fields of 
the carboniferous age and the mining industries in 
iron, copper, lead, silver, and gold. 

This collection is for sale, and it is to be hoped 
that it will be secured, together with a building suit- 
able for its exhibition, by the Saratoga Athenaeum. 



THK 



DELAWARE&HUDSON R.R. 

"THE FAVORITE TOURIST ROUTE" 

TO 

LAKE GEORGE, LAKE CHAMPLAIN, 

Ausable Chasm, Cooperstown, 
jSharon ^prings and the Gravity Railroad. 



Excursion Tickets to the above nattied points are on sale at the 
Saratoga Office of the Cot?ipany. 



CONNECTIONS. 

At Albany with New York Central & Hudson River R.R., West Shore Ry., 
Boston & Albany R.R., People s Line Steamers and Day Line Steamers. 

At Troy with N. Y. C. & H. R.R., Troy and Boston R.R , and Citizens' 
Line Steamers. 

At Mechanicsville with Boston, Hoosac Tunnel and Western Ry. 

At Schenectady with N. Y. C. & H. R. R.R. and Susquehanna Division. 

At Caldwell and Baldwin with Lake George Steamers. 

At Rutland with Central Vermont R.R. 

At Eagle Bkidge with Troy and Boston, and B., H. T. & W. Ry. 

At Fort Ticonderoga with Strs. on Lake Champlain, and with Baldwin Br. 

At Westport with Stages for Ehzabethtown, Keene Valley, Lake Placid, etc. 

At Port Kent with Stages for Ausable Chasm and Keeseville. 

At Plattsburg with Chateaugay R.R. for Saranac Lakes and Adirondack 
Mountain Points. 

At Ausable with Stages for Paul Smith's, Saranac Lakes, Lake Placid, etc. 

At Rouse's Point with G. T. Ry., O. & L. C. R.R., and Canada Atlantic R R. 



TRACK, EQUIPMENT AND SERYICE UNSURPASSED. 

For maps, time-tables and descriptive guide address 

J, W. BURDICK, General Passenger Agent, 
Delaware & Hudson Canal Co.'s Railroad, Albany, N. Y. 




A QUIET SCENE. 
Engraved by the Photo-Engraving Co, 



PEisnsriNGrroisrs 

prescription ^ftarrnac^, 

400 BROADWAY, SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. 



Special attention to Physicians' Prescriptions and Family Orders. 

Proprietor and manufacturer of Norwegian Bairn, ;md Troches for all 

Bronchial Complaints ; and the well-known Hair Tonique. 

T. H. SANDS, PENNINGTON. 

THE 

CITIZENS" NATIONAL B/NK, 

Has ample facilities for the transaction of a 

GENERAL BANKING BUSINESS. 

D. A. BULLARD, President. L. A. SHARP, Cashier. 

^Saratoga pftofograpfter 

E. A. RECORD. 

The Winter Scenes in this book were engraved from 
photographs by E. A. Record. 

BROADWAY & PHIL A STREET, SARATOGA SPRINGS, N. Y. 

iThe Saratoga Neuis, 

(ILLUSTRATED.) 

The first issue for the Season of 1S87 will appear 
June 25th. 

SO cts. for trie Season, 5 cts per Copy. 

H. BRADFORD ROCKWOOD, Editor. 

F. G. BARRY, Proprietor. 



BAILWAYS. 

Delaware & Hudson Railway, running north to Mon- 
treal and south to Albany and Troy, where it connects with the 
New York Central & Hudson River Railway for New York 
and the South and West. 

The time-tables of the Delaware & Hudson & New York 
Central & Hudson River Railways are arranged to accommo- 
date the continually increasing travel to Saratoga Springs, 

Boston, Hoosac Tunnel & Western Railway, running 
East and making connections for Boston and all points in New 
England. 

The Adirondack Railway, running from Saratoga to North 
Creek. The tourist will find this an excellent point for enter- 
ing the North Woods, and he should be sure to provide himself 
with a pretty little guide, published by the railway company, 
called "Birch Bark from the Adirondacks. " Wallace's and 
Stoddard's Guides are also recommended. The following stage 
connections are made with this railway : 

At Jessup's Landing for Corinth and Palmer Falls ; at Had- 
ley for Conklingville and the Sacandaga Valley ; at Stony 
Creek for Creek Centre and West Stony Creek (Harrisburg) ; 
at Thurman for Warrensburg ; at Riverside for Chester, Pot- 
tersville, Schroon Lake, Weavertown, Johnsburg ; at North 
Creek for Minerva, Aiden Lair, Newcomb, Long Lake, North 
River, Indian River, Cedar River, and Blue Mountain Lake. 

No visitor to Saratoga should fail to see the glorious Adiron 
dack hills, whence cometh the ozone that makes the remedial 
reputation of the Saratoga climate, and where some of the most 
enduring matrimonial alliances are contracted. 

The Mt. McGregor Railway will give the tourist a day's 
outing, or a longer sojourn if he prefers, in the midst of a pic- 
turesque panorama rarely to be seen. And he will retain a 
grateful recollection of his visit, if he leaves his hay fever be- 
hind when he leaves for home. 



R. NEWTON BREZEE, 

%xth\\tt\ 

AND 

BUILDING SUPERINTENDENT, 

Saratoga Springs. 

1887. Quickest Jime. 1887. 

jpltiwi" Hint Jtamcts* 

FAST FREIGHT LINE 

BETWEEN NEW YORK AND TROY, 

IN CONNECTION WITH 

Delaware & Hudson Canal Co.'s R.R., Troy & Boston R.R., Boston, Hoosac 

Tunnel & Western Railway, Ogdensburg & Lake Champlain 

Railroad, and Lake Champlain Steamers. 



st e a:ivi: E IR s 

SARATOGA, CITY OF TROY, 

Capt. Abrams, Capt. Wolcott, 

Daily from New York (Saturday excepted), 6 p.m. Daily from Troy on arrival 

of Evening Train. Through Rates as low as by any Rail or Steamboat 

Line. To secure dispatch, consign all freight via Citizens' Line, 

and sbip from Pier 44, foot of Christopher St., New York. 

G. W. GIBSON, Gen. Pass. Agt., Troy. G. \V. HORTON, Gen. Agt.,Troy. 
JAS. L. PRINDLE, Traveling Agent. 



&f)e Saratoga 0un. 

PUBLISHED EVERY WEEK IN THE YEAR. 



THE only Democratic Newspaper published at the Great American 
Watering Place. 

LARGEST CIRCULATION IX NORTHERN NEW YORK. 

A Clean, Able, High-toned Family Journal. Society Reports a specialty. 
One Dollar a Year, in advance. 

E. P. HOWE, Proprietor and Editor. 



THE SARATOGA CITIZENS' CORPS. 

The Saratoga Citizens' Corps is the pride of the village. 
It cultivates politeness, uprightness, and costume, also a 
feeling of security in case of a foreign invasion before 
our coast defences are completed. 

Soldiers are often admonished for aiming too high, but 
an Armory is none too high a mark for the Citizens' Corps 
to aim at, and it ought not to be difficult to hit. 



GRAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC. 

•The Grand Army of the Republic is represented at 
Saratoga Springs by Post L. M. Wheeler, No. 92. 

There is something very pathetic and affecting in the 
scrupulous fidelity with which these veterans cherish the 
memories of a crisis receding day by day into the irrevo- 
cable past. They remind us by their presence that men 
as brave and true as any that fell in battle are falling now 
one after another from the ranks of those who survived 
the war. And presently there will be none left to tell 
the story of the great conflict, except those who tell it as 
it was told to them. 

CHARITIES. 

The Humane Society deserves the substantial support 
of every good citizen. In fact no man or woman can be 
a good citizen without being good to helpless animals, 
whether horses, dogs, or children. 

St. Christina Home for Sick Children. 

Home of the Good Shepherd for Aged and Infirm per- 
sons of both sexes. 




A VICHY. 



@Z®®&9 



A MEDICINAL BEVERAGE 

AND 

A DELICIOUS MEDICINE. 



|T may be taken Cold or Warm, at Meals and 
between Meals. 

A Cooling Drink on a Warm Day, and a Warming 
Drink on a Cold Day. 

It Mixes well with Syrup, Wine or Milk. 

It Corrects Acidity, Assists Digestion, and Regulates 
the Kidneys. 

It is an Alkaline Water, and as such there is no 
Mineral Water in this country, and only one in Europe, 
to compare with it. 



j3old in Bottles or on J) r a u g h t, 

By all Druggists in Saratoga. 



Address 



SARATOGA VICHY SPRING CO., 

Saratoga Springs, N. Y. 



SARATOGA TOBOGGAN CLUB. 

The Saratoga Toboggan Club was organized De- 
cember 2d, 1884, and incorporated April 27th, 
1885. The slide and club house are at Glen 
Mitchell, just beyond Woodlawn Park. 

President. — Le Grand C. Cramer. 
Vice-President. — A. Gerald Hull. 

Secretary. — Antoine de R. McNair. 

Treasurer. — Waldo L. Rich. 

Slide Committee. — Le Grand C. Cramer, A. 
Gerald Hull, Cornelius E. Durkee, John A. Man- 
ning, II. S. Leech. 

The Saratoga Toboggan Club has been, so far, a 
perfect success, financially, hygienically, and Sara- 
togatively. It has established the Saratoga Win- 
ter Cure upon an enduring foundation. It has 
promoted public spirit and animal spirits, the love 
of healthy fun, and muscular development. Its 
slide is the longest in the world, except that of Mt. 
Blanc, and its costumes, together with those of the 
jolly Snow Shoe Club, make Saratoga as picturesque 
in winter as it is in summer. 

Nothing would so fortify our esteemed contem- 
poraries of the Ohio River and the Gulf of Mexico 
against the debilitating effect of their summer as 
three months' tobogganing and snow-shoeing at 
Saratoga Springs. 



LEGGAT BROS/ 

Cheapest B°°kstore 



IN THE 



WORLD! 



LIBRARIES AND OLD BOOKS BOUGHT, 



MILLION 



BOOKS, 

RARE, CURIOUS AND CURRENT, 

ON HAND, 

ALMOST GIVEN AWAY. 



Mammoth Catalogue Free, 



81 Chambers Street, 

Three doors west of City Hall Park. NEW YORK. 




"A GOOD CATCH." 



J. JC. folwid & &>., 

HfflGGSIS & jVWVWSi 

388 Broadway, 

0pp> u - s - Hotel> S^ratog^ Springs, H. Y. 

Established 1864. 

Walter Jennery, 

Dealer in 



'9 

No. 428 Broadway, SARATOGA SPRINGS, N. Y. 

F. M. OLMSTED & CO., 
HOSIERY, GLOVES, UNDERWEAR, 

AND FINE FURNISHINGS, 

No. 379 BROADWAY, 

First Store South of U. S. Hotel, SARATOGA SPRINGS, N. Y. 

JOHN JQ H NSO N 6 CO. s$&^«ss 

to do first-class Book, Law 
and Job Printing 15 to 50 per cent, lower than any other firm 
in Saratoga. They also supply fine Stationery to thousands 
at these prices : 25 envelopes, 5 cents ; 24 sheets writing paper, 
5 cents ; 18 sheets legal cap, or foolscap, 10 cents ; a box of 
250 envelopes, 40 cents ; 4S0 sheets of fine paper for 90 cents. 
Old papers, 20 cents, per . -... nr>inrn nnillTrnn 

at the popular office 3 of the LU H "Till ItU I lllll I LHui 



THE SiVKATOGA ATHENAEUM. 

The object of the Saratoga Athenaeum is to furnish 
Saratoga Springs with a Public Circulating and Reference 
Library, a Public Reading-Room, a Lectureship, a School 
of Design, a Museum, an Art Gallery, a department of 
Science, a Gymnasium, and such conveniences for indoor 
games as shall be in keeping with the spirit and scope of 
such an institution. 

The Saratoga Athenaeum was organized December 27th, 
1884 ; trustees were elected February 17th, 1885, the 
association was incorporated March 13th, 1885, and the 
constitution was adopted at the first annual meeting, De- 
cember 28th, 1885. 

BOARD OP TRUSTEES. 

Nathan Sheppard, President. 

W. B. French, Secretary, C. C. Lester, Treasurer, 

Spencer Trask, J. R. Chapman, 

J. W. Drexel, W. R. Terrett, 

A. de R. McKair, H. S. Leech. 
S. Gifford Slocum, 

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE. 

Nathan Sheppard, S. Gifford Slocum. 

C. C. Lester, 

LIBRARIAN. 

Miss Juliet McB. Hill. 



LADIES 


COMMITTEE. 


Mrs. McNair, Chairman, 


Mrs. 


S. G. Slocum, Secretary, 


" W. B. French, 


n 


Spencer Trask, 


" Batcheller, 


" 


Waldo Rich, 


" Nathan Sheppard, 


Miss 


Mary Shepherd, 


" W. R. Terrett, 


" 


Susan Lester, 


M W. H. Biyant, 


" 


Carrie A. Hamilton, 


" McEwen, 


" 


Miriam W. Dowd, 


" Manning, 


it 


Anna Jones, 


" Brackett, 


" 


Nellie Walworth. 


" W. H. Bockes, 






LIFE 


MEMBERS. 


J. R. Chapman, 




A. de R. McNair, 


Cornelius Vanderbilt, 




Wm. Ingham, 


Edward Kearney, 




B. W. Clapp, 


Spencer Trask, 




J. M. Marvin, 


Nathan Sheppard, 




R. C. McEwen, 


W. T. Rockwood, 




W. R. Weed, 


W. B. French, 




T. B. Reynolds, 


G. R. Sherman, 




H. S. Leech, 


J. W. Fuller, 




George K. Thomas, 


C. C. Lester, 




Thomas B. Carroll, 


S. G. Slocum, 




J. M. Jones, 


W. H. Bockes, 




Abel Putnam, 


W. A. Shepard, 




J. W. Burtis, 


S. E. Strong, 




J. P. Conkling, 


Albert Spencer, 




W. H. Pitkin, 


James Mi n gay, 




G. Mannheimer. 



J. W. Drexel, 
The life-membership fee is one hundred dollars, which 
may be paid in four annual payments. The annual mem- 
bership fee is five dollars. Members' families are entitled 
to the use of the Library, Reading-Room, and the School 
of Design Room for drawing, sketching, and wood -carv- 
ing. There are fifty casts of classical subjects in the 
School of Design Room. Ticket to the Library and 
Reading-Room for one year two dollars, for one month 
fifty cents, for one week twenty-five cents. 



FIRST UilTlO&M BAM, 

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N. Y. 

A. BOCKES, President. P. P. WIGGINS, Vice-Pres't. 

WM. HAY BOCKES, Cashier. 



CAPITAL $100,000 I Surplus and Profits, over $100,000 

TRANSACTS A GENERAL BANKING BUSINESS 
C. B. Thomas. THOMAS & BROWN, W. E. Brown. 

COAL, WOOD, KINDLINGS, CHARCOAL, 

CEMENTS 

(Best American, English and Roman), 

LIME, SEA-SAND, PLASTER, HAIR. 

Offices : \ %HBK%ggk&mE£, ! SARATOGA SPRINGS, I. Y. 

Orders left at Broadway office, or sent by telephone, will receive prompt attention. 

OPEN THE YEAR ROUND. 



SARATOGA SPRINGS. 

Directly opposite the United States Hotel ; near Depot, Stores, 
Springs and Athencenm Reading Room. 



HEADQUARTERS EOR SARATOGA WINTER SPORTS. 



NEWLY FURNISHED THROUGHOUT, 

And provided with 

every comfort and convenience of a Winter as well as Summer Hotel, for 

Permanent and Transient Guests. 

W. W. WORDEN, Proprietor. 



ATHENAEUM READING-ROOM. 

One block north of United States Hotel, east side of Broadway, corner of 
Caroline Street. 

Cool and pleasant room. 

Open every day, except Sundays and holidays, 
from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. 

Daily papers, illustrated papers, comic papers, 
children's papers, popular magazines, art and sci- 
ence periodicals. 

Circulating library. 

Twenty-live cents a week, 50 cents a month, $2 a 
year. 

Contributions of money, books, and periodicals 
will be thankfully received. 




DR. ROBERT HAMILTON'S MEDICAL INSTITUTE AND SUMMER RESORT. 
Established in 1857. Open all the year. 

Physicians— R. Hamilton, M.D.; Mrs. A. P. Ketchum, M.D., Assistant. 




This establishment is charmingly located, near the principal Springs, Churches 
and Hotels, and carefully adapted to the requirements of invalids and guests. 

The BOARDING DEPARTMENT is well regulated, the Halls and Parlors 
unusually pleasant, and the Sleeping-rooms cheerful, airy and well furnished. 

The institution is open as a summer boarding-house during the season, is kept 
in good style, and in such a manner that no features of a medical institution are 
observable. Among its patrons are Rev. John P. Newman, D.D.; Rev. E. A. 
Roche. D.D.; Rev. John Cookman, D.D.; John N. Stearns ; Rev. J. W. Olm- 
sted, D.D., and prominent men in Church and State. 

SPECIAL INDUCEMENTS are offered to those seeking health, as, in 
addition to the ordinary medicinal agents employed in general practice, the most 
Scientific Remedial Appliances are here in use, including Electro-Chemical, 
Sulphur and other Baths, Swedish Movement, Health Lift, Inhalation, etc. 

SPECIALTY of Chronic Diseases and Female and Lung affections. 

LECTURES weekly, by Dr HAMILTON and others. " Dr. Hamilton is 
one of the most reliable consulting physicians in Saratoga, and having long re- 
sided and practiced in Saratoga, and observed the various spring waters on 
different constitutions and in different diseases, is qualified to give advice to 
those who wish to drink the mineral waters in a systematic way and to the best 
advantage. Dr. Hamilton makes a specialty of this practice, and is recognized 
as a most excellent authority on the subject." 

TERMS, from $10 to $20 per week, depending upon the room occupied and 
attention required, For further information apply to 

R. HAMILTON, M.D., Saratoga Springs, N. Y. 



AS NECESSARY TO SARATOGA AS A 
NEST TO A BIRD, 

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in speaking thus of the 
Boston City Library, speaks a word for such a library at 
Saratoga Springs : 

" If a scholar, no matter how poor, wants to consult a 
rare and costly book, it is put into his hands, and he can 
sit down at a quiet table, or, in many cases, carry it to 
his home and keep it until it has given up whatever it has 
of useful matter for him. I have found this privilege 
inestimable, and, when a library is once fairly begun, it 
becomes more and more valuable every year, as a matter 
of course, for it grows like a rolling snow-ball. Such a 
library is as necessary to a town as a nest is to a pair of 
birds. Scholars are sure to be hatched in it sooner or 
later, and in all such institutions you will see a good 
many old birds that love to nestle, and find themselves very 
warm and comfortable whether they breed and sing or 
not." 

Who would not like to see the day when Saratoga 
shall furnish this " quiet table" to rising scholars and 
this " comfortable nest ' ' to the " old birds" who want to 
study as well as rest in Saratoga ? 

The reading-room Dr. Holmes calls a school-room : 

" In the reading-room belonging to our city library I 
see large numbers of persons, silent, occupied, intent on 
the papers, magazines, reviews, which are abundantly 
provided for them. They are at school with no master 
to pay." 



j3. <Y(. ^ULLER^ py\INT AND *QlL JStORE, 

44 PUTNAM ST., SARATOGA SPRINGS, X. I. 

Turpentine, Varnish, Japan, Shellac ; Plate and Window Glass; Cathedral, 

Ground, Plain and Figured Glass. 

Town and Country. Ready Mixed Paints. ARTISTS' MATERIAL, Etc. 



Fl I I FR X QOMQ practical HOUSE, SIGN and ORNAMENTAL 

pF^AINERS, PLAZIEI^S, J< ALSOMINEt^S, ^TC. , 

44 PUTNAM ST., SARATOGA SPRINGS, X. Y. 

TT7HE RED SPRING COMPANY struck a new 
1 spring, April 26, 1SS7, which differs materially from their 
other spring. The water is far more pungent, and is largely 
charged with carbonic acid gas, rendering it very palatable and 
agreeable. It flows out of the rock from a depth of fifty feet, 
and is, apparently, inexhaustible. 




jwp 



$4 a Year in Advance ; $2 50 
for Six Months. 



BUBBLES FROM THE SPRINGS. 

The Hathorn proprietors have given the mineral-water 
drinkers what they sorely needed — a place of shelter for 
winter and summer, day and evening. It is an enclosed 
pavilion, ample in dimensions to accommodate all who 
come, and with new interior decorations that make it very 
pleasing and inviting. 

The Red Spring Company are keeping pace with the 
increasing demand for their waters for both drinking and 
bathing purposes. They gave more baths last year than 
they ever did before, and there is no doubt that the num 
ber of their bathers for 1887 will be greater than that of 
any previous year. 

It is to be hoped that the Vichy Company will soon tap 
a new vein — not that it could be superior in water to the 
old one, but it might enable the company to supply a 
demand which is limited only by the capacity of the 
spring. Nobody knows how many would drink Saratoga 
Vichy, if everybody who wants it could be supplied 
with it. 

The proprietor of the Magnetic Spring Baths has added 
largely to his bathing conveniences, and now has one of 
the most elegant as well as commodious bathing establish- 
ments in this country. 

There were at the last count thirty- one mineral springs 
at Saratoga. "A." ; Apollos ; Artesian Seltzer ; Carls- 
bad ; Champion ; Columbian ; Congress ; Crystal ; Dia- 
mond ; Empire ; Eureka ; Excelsior ; Flat Rock ; Gey- 
ser ; Hamilton ; Hathorn ; High Rock ; Kissingen ; 
Magnetic ; New Putnam ; Pavilion ; Putnam ; Red ; 
Seltzer ; Star ; Union ; Triton ; United States ; Vichy ; 
Washington ; White Sulphur. 




JYoic the invalid infants are taken to the fountains of chlorite 
of sodium." 



THE EEAL ESTATE BOOM. 

The boom in Saratoga real estate continues*un- 
abated, and every sign indicates that 1887 will 
eclipse every preceding year in the amount of cap- 
ital invested in Saratoga homes. 
, Among the residences in course of erection are 
those of Lieutenant-Commander A. de E,. McNair, 
Hon. Henry Hilton, Mrs. D. S. Lathrop, Mrs. 
George P. Lawton, Mrs. T. B. Gunning, J. H. 
Pardue, Isaac K Phelps, E. C. Clark, Frank H. 
Hathorn, Le Grand C. Cramer, Edward Kearney, 
Mrs. McB. Davidson, James Lee, and three to 
be erected by E. F. O'Connor and J. H. Pardue. 
A large number of residences have just been com- 
pleted, and a larger number of old ones have been 
built over. 

Extensive purchases of real estate have recently 
been made by Hon. Henry Hilton, Hon. Levi P. 
Morton, Spencer Trask, Edward Kearney, H. S. 
Leech, and Eugene F. O'Connor. 



" Profoundly philosophical."— JOSEPH T. DURYEA. 

" Knocks to flinders the theories of elocutionists.' 1 ' — IV. Y. EVANGELIST, 

" Full of practical and sensible suggestions.'"— CHRISTIAN UNION. 



BEFORE AN AUDIENCE; 

OR, 

The Use of the Will in Public Speaking 

Talks to the Students of the University of St. 

Andrews and the University 

of Aberdeen. 

BY 

NATHAN SHEPPARD, 

Author of " Sar:itog;i Chips and Carlsbad Wafers; " " Shut up in Paris; " and 
Editor of "Darwinism Stated by Darwin Himself;" "The Dickens 
Reader;" " Character Readings from George Eliot; M and " George Eliot's 
Essays. 



This hook would he remarkahle and noteworthy if for no other reason than 
that it is absolutely the only one of its kind in the world. Not oidy has no 
Other writer or teacher treated on the subject of Public Speaking in the same 
way, but we doubt if there is another book to be found upon that subject in its 
literal and exact sense. Elocution Manuals and Readers and books treating 
vocal and gesticulatory gymnastics there are in great abundance, but where is 
there another practical work on the great art of Public Speaking ? The very 
phrase is not in use in our colleges and schools, where the future public 
speakers are supposed to be trained. 

This book, by a man who, by common consent, is entitled from experience 
and success to know what he is talking about in these " Talks," fills this defici- 
ency, and has won the cordial commendation of preachers and lawyers. While 
it is sure of the approbation of all practical public speakers, it is equally sure 
of the disapproval of all who suppose that one can learn how to speak a speech 
of his own composing by learning the "emphasis" of another man's oration 
or poem. 

While " Before an Audience " is interesting on account of its spicy way of 
putting things, and its anecdotes and adventures, it is specially useful to those 
who have the profession of lawyer or preacher in view, or those who are occa- 
sionally called upon to speak in public. The author uses it when teaching 
classes, and the student may teach himself by a careful attention to its injunc- 
tions. It will be found a class book of inestimable value. 



12mo, Cloth, 75 cents, 
FUNK & WAGNALLS, Publishers, New York. 



HOTEL NOTES FOE 1887. 

The Worden has been elegantly refurnished and 
redecorated, and now has one of the most attractive 
hotel interiors in the State. It is open all the year 
round, and is the headquarters for visitors who 
come to participate in the winter sports. 

Congress Hall w T ill open on the 18th of June 
under the management of Colonel H. S. Clement. 
Extensive sanitary improvements have been made, 
and the hotel is in first-rate condition in every re- 
spect. 

The United States Hotel will open about the 
middle of June, under the old management, Tomp- 
kins, Gage & Perry. 

The Windsor will open on Wednesday, June 1st. 

The Grand Union will open on Saturday, June 
25th. 

The Windsor and Grand Union will both be 
under the management of Mr. John M. Otter. 

The Kensington will open on the 1 8th of June, 
under the management of Mr. Paul C. Grening, 
who has purchased the hotel, and made several im- 
portant improvements. 

The Clarendon will open on the 25th of June, 



and if the management take as much pains as 
they did last year to provide their guests with 
comfort and amusement, the hotel will lose none of 
its excellent reputation. 

Music will be furnished as usual at the United 
States, the Grand Union, the Clarendon, Congress 
Hall, and the Kensington, and there will be the 
usual Garden Parties at the Grand Union and the 
Clarendon. 

Judging from the number of rooms already en- 
gaged at the leading hotels, the hotel season will be 
quite equal to that of 1886, which was one of the 
best ever known at Saratoga. 



SARATOGA RACES. 

The Saratoga Association for the Improvement 
of the Breed of Horses will reopen their track on 
the 19th of July, 1887, and the races will continue 
until about the 1st of September. 

These races, like those of the famous courses of 
Europe, are all running races. They are attended 
by some of the most noted breeders and owners of 
European horses, as much on account of the order 
and propriety with which they are conducted as 
the high class of horses entered. 



PUBLIC AND PEIYATE SCHOOLS. 

Edward JS\ Jones, Superintendent of Public 
Schools, and Secretary of the Board of Education. 

J. Edman Massee, Principal of the High School. 

Annie M. Spence, Yice -Principal of the High 
School. 

BOARD OF EDUCATION. 

Charles F. Fish, President, 
James R. Gibbs, 
Timothy Harrington, 
Charles L. Haskins, 
William H. McCall, 
John McNamara, 
Lester A. Sharp, 
William H. Waterbury, 
Walter S. Wright. 

Temple Grove Seminary for Young Ladies. — 
Principal, Eev. Charles F. Dowd, A.M. 

Saratoga Institute for Boys. — Principal, George 
W. Yates, A.M. 

Professor von Below's Select Boarding School 
for Boys. 

Mrs. E. H. Walworth's School for Young Ladies 
and Girls. 

St. Clement's College for Young Men. 



DEIYES AND WALKS. 

The Grand Drive. — Union Avenue to Saratoga Lake. The 
scene on this thoroughfare of an afternoon during the summer 
season, or of a winter's afternoon during the sleighing season, 
is well worth seeing, and it will be of still more consequence to 
the looker-on when he becomes a member of the exhilarating 
procession. 

Union Avenue is growing rapidly in importance. The march 
of handsome residences has crossed Nelson Avenue, and must 
soon reach the eastern limit of the Plateau — provided Union 
Avenue is kept in good repair for the rider and pedestrian, and 
kept free from drinking brothels and impudent advertisements 
that obstruct the view and offend the taste. 

While we Americans are borrowing names for towns and 
springs from our foreign contemporaries, let us not neglect to 
imitate their public resorts in furnishing the pedestrian a good 
walk to walk on, and the rider a good road to ride on. There 
is not a bad road at any of the European watering-places. 
Nothing repels the visitor like dark streets at night and rough 
ones in the daytime. Hotels, however well-managed, cannot 
compensate for an ill-managed town. 

The Saratoga Lake Drive. — Union Avenue to Saratoga 
Lake, around the lake and return by Nelson Avenue. 

The Yaddo Drive. — Union Avenue to and through the 
private park and among the trout lakes of Spencer Trask, 
Esq. Recent enlargement and improvements have made these 
grounds resemble more than ever the country residence of the 
English gentleman. 

The North Broadway Drive. —North Broadway is one of 
the best-arranged and most pleasant avenues for either a drive 
or a stroll to be found at any of the popular or fashionable re- 
sorts of this country. It is double -lined with magnificent 



elms, the lawns are kept in perfect order, while the residences 
are very costly and of striking architectural beauty. 

Those who have not seen North Broadway for three years 
will be surprised and charmed by the new residences. 

The Woodlawn Park Drive. — North Broadway to and 
through the private park of the Hon. Henry Hilton. This 
Park is now of national reputation for landscape gardening. 

The Greenfield Drive. — North Broadway through Wood- 
lawn Park to Greenfield commanding some superb Adirondack 
and Vermont views. 

The Ballston Drive. — Ballston Avenue by the Vichy and 
Geyser Springs to the charming village of Ballston Spa. 

Ballston Avenue is another natural thoroughfare, and 
should be made pleasant and inviting to those who enjoy a walk 
or a drive of a summer's day. It needs more shade trees and 
a better sidewalk. The capital invested in the mineral springs 
upon this avenue could not be more wisely spent than in mak- 
ing those springs easy of aca 

THE SCHTJYLERVILLE Dkivk. — Union Avenue, going or re- 
turning by Quaker Springs and Bemus Heights and the Sara- 
toga battle-ground. The Battle Monument is at Sehuylerville. 

MOUNT McGregor Dkivk. — North Broadway or Maple 
Avenue by Glen Mitchell, the Toboggan Slide and St. Cle- 
ment's College. 

There are some very desirable suburban drives, such as the 
drive to Albany, Troy, Syracuse, Glen's Falls, Sandy Hill, 
Tieonderoga, and Bound Lake, where there is an Assembly, 
alter the manner of Chautauqua, every summer. 

In fact for those who are sensible enough to believe that the 
carriage is the most enjoyable and refreshing of all the methods 
of human locomotion, Saratoga is a natural starting-point. 
From here the earriager may jog along at the rate of about 
thirty miles a day to and through the Adirondack*, or to Lake 
George, or the White Mountains, the Thousand Islands, Au- 
sable Chasm, the Green Mountains, or, indeed, to any point that 
the four-wheeled tourist may select in Northern New York, 
Canada, or New England. 

As walking is, in the opinion of the hygienic authorities, the 
best exercise known to the human muscles, the pedestrian will 
find some protracted and charming opportunities around Sara- 



toga Springs. Some of them are the same in name as the 
drives, such as North Broadway, Woodlawn Park, Ballston 
Avenue, Union Avenue, Kelson Avenue, and Yaddo Park. 

The walkist will enjoy both a stroll and a lounge in Congress 
Park, which is kept in immaculate condition during the sum- 
mer, and is as. restful to the body as it is pleasing to the eye. 
The flowers are in such profusion and luxuriance as to remind 
one of the garden at Wiesbaden, while the music beguiles you 
of many an hour which you might otherwise have spent in 
crossing bridges that you will never reach, or in worrying over 
investments in Western real estate that ought to have been made 
at Saratoga Springs. 

The number of matches made in the beautiful Congress Park 
is supposed to be equal to the number struck for lighting 
cigars. This extraordinary calculation is not susceptible of 
proof, but true it is, certainly, that no department of this Spa 
provides so many cosey and tempting opportunities for "two 
hearts that beat as one, ' ' to beat away at their leisure. 

Just beyond Congress Park the strolling pedestrian will find 
Saratoga's beautiful " God's Acre," called Greenridge, where 
those who have overworked the Gayety Cure will find a remedy 
for their levity in the meditations suggested by the associations 
of the place " and the use to which it is applied." 




EASTERN LOOK-OUT, MT. McGKEGOR. 



A JOLLY WINTER. 

Every winter gives Saratoga a new impulse for- 
ward as a winter resort. The winter of 1886-87 
was its third winter for winter sports, and a never- 
to-be-forgotten one. 

•There were three months of tobogganing and 
snow-shoeing, and one hundred and fifty days and 
nights of perfect sleighing. The snow fell quietly, 
and came so soon that very little frost could get into 
the ground, so that vegetation was kept in prime 
condition for the spring opening. There was no 
wind, the sun shone, and the moon shone, and the 
stars shone. The air was dry and cold, and the cold 
was wonderfully uniform and uniformly exhilarat- 
ing. 

It was a healthy and a festive winter. Every- 
body came out of it feeling the better for it, except 
those who went south to get rid of it, and were 
obliged to return to get themselves cleared of the 
malaria contracted during their absence. 




The air mas dry and cold, and the cold teas wonderfully uni- 
f or in and uniformly exhilarating." 



DIRECTIONS FOE THE MINERAL- WATER 
TREATMENT. 

The Mineral- Water Treatment may be tried by any one who 
knows which water is best for him, and has self-control enough 
to stop eating when he has eaten enough. 

Get a physician's diagnosis of your case, if you have a case. 
"Be governed in the amount of water by its effects. 

Drink the requisite amount an hour before breakfast, and 
walk about while drinking ; cheerful conversation is also rec- 
ommended. 

Breakfast at about 7.30 a.m. Zwieback or plain bread, eggs, 
or half your ordinary ration of meat. One cup of coffee, tea, or 
milk. English breakfast tea is recommended. 

Mineral- water bath during the morning. The kind of bath, 
and the amount of time required for it, to be determined by ex- 
perience, and consultation with those who have had experience. 
See advertisements of baths in this book. 

Dinner at about 1 o'clock. Plain soup, meat, or fish, and 
vegetables. Milk, cold or hot, or any table mineral water such 
as Saratoga Vichy. 

Eat slowly, chew thoroughly. Don't think of your business 
and don't worry while you eat. 

Supper at 6 p.m. Cold or hot milk, zwieback or plain bread, 
cold meat or a small piece of hot steak or a chop. 

Go to bed at about 9 or 9.30 o'clock. 

Abstain from tobacco, spirits, opium, grease, sweets, pickles, 
iced water, pork, highly-seasoned food, pastry, rich cake, and 
eat sparingly of butter, especially if it is not butter. Control 
your appetite ; do not allow your appetite to get control of your 
will and reason. 



Take every means to keep placid, and avoid everybody and 
every subject calculated to make you argue, fight, or quarrel. 
Study to be quiet. 

Read diverting not exciting stories, and live in the open air 
to the utmost amount of time allotted you by the weather or 
your business. But don't be afraid of the weather ! 

Take regular exercise by walking, horseback-riding, bycy- 
cling, or gymnastics. Remember that no mineral water will 
counteract the effect of inertia, indolence, gormandizing, intox- 
icating drinks, or intoxicating opinions. 

To recapitulate, the .Mineral-Water Treatment consists of 
mineral water, mineral-water baths, mastication, cheerfulness, 
abstemiousness, wholesome food, exercise, sleep, self-restraint,' 
and general reasonableness of life. 



SARATOGA LIMITED. 

The New York Central and Hudson River Railroad Com- 
pany has arranged for a "Saratoga Limited," to be run on 
Saturdays and Mondays only, during the summer months. 

The Saratoga Limited will be composed exclusively of ele- 
gant drawing-room and bullet smoking cars. This train will 
leave Grand Central Depot, New York, 2.60 p.m.. on Saturdays 
only, and arrive in Saratoga 7.30 p.m., in ample time for 
supper. 

The return train will leave Saratoga early Monday morning, 
making a corresponding run to New York, arriving at noon! 
to permit brokers and business men to reach the exchanges and 
business houses about 12.30 p.m., lunch being served from the 
buffets on the train before arrival at the Grand Central Depot. 

The Saratoga Limited is in addition to and will not interfere 
will, the regular '"Saratoga Specials 1 ' that will leave Grand 
Central Depot every day in the week, except Sunday, at 9 a.m. 
and 3.30 p.m. during the season, commencing about June 27 
1887. 



THE 



DAILY SARATOGIAN. 



SARATOGA SPRINGS, N. Y., 

A morning paper in summer and an evening issue in winter, is 
read by a large regular constituency, and by almost tJie entire 
body of Summer tourists in America. Thousands of copies 
are also annually read by those in attendance upon Religious, 
Political and Industrial Conventions, of which there is, early 
and late in the season, an almost uninterrupted succession in 
Saratoga. 

To the large number of advertisers who desire to attract 
the attention of this class of the population, it offers an adver- 
tising medium superior to any other newspaper in the country. 
The proprietors of summer hotels and the managers of rail- 
road and steamboat lines readily discern the value of the 
Daily Saratogian as an advertising medium, and dealers in 
the extensive classes of goods required by summer tourists also 
appreciate its advantages. 

The Daily Saratogian has maintained the positio?i of 
the leading journal of this section of the State. It is the only 
paper at Saratoga having a regular press franchise besides 
special correspondence by telegraph. It is on file at every im- 
portant summer resort in the United States. 

Advertising rates and all other information promptly fur- 
nished on application. 

J. H. WORMAN, Editor and Manager. 



f^ 






Lester Brothers 



ileal gstale. 




Uf 



ANY information respecting Real Estate at Saratoga, in- 
cluding Cottages, furnished or unfurnished, for sale 
or to let, building lots, villa sites, hotels, and property for 
business purposes or investment may be had by applying 
to 

LEgTEF( BROTHERS, 

Saratoga Springs, N. Y. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 





007 032 707 7 



